Ethnography (from Greekἔθνοςethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφωgrapho "I write") is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. An ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group, the word can thus be said to have a double meaning, which partly depends on whether it is used as a count noun or uncountable.[1] The resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group.[2][3][4]

Ethnography, as the presentation of empirical data on human societies and cultures, was pioneered in the biological, social, and cultural branches of anthropology, but it has also become popular in the social sciences in general—sociology,[5] communication studies, history—wherever people study ethnic groups, formations, compositions, resettlements, social welfare characteristics, materiality, spirituality, and a people's ethnogenesis.[6] The typical ethnography is a holistic study[7][8] and so includes a brief history, and an analysis of the terrain, the climate, and the habitat. In all cases, it should be reflexive, make a substantial contribution toward the understanding of the social life of humans, have an aesthetic impact on the reader, and express a credible reality. An ethnography records all observed behavior and describes all symbol-meaning relations, using concepts that avoid causal explanations.

The word 'ethnography' is derived from the Greek ἔθνος (ethnos), meaning "a company, later a people, nation" and -graphy meaning "field of study". Ethnographic studies focus on large cultural groups of people who interact over time. Ethnography is a set of qualitative methods that are used in social sciences that focus on the observation of social practices and interactions,[9] its aim is to observe a situation without imposing any deductive structure or framework upon it and to view everything as strange or unique.[10]

The field of anthropology originated from Europe and England designed in late 19th century, it spread its roots to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the main contributors like EB Tylor (1832-1917) from Britain and Lewis H Morgan (1818-1881), an American scientist were considered as founders of cultural and social dimensions. Franz Boas (1858-1942), Bronislaw Malinowski (1858—1942), Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead (1901-1978), were a group of researchers from the United States who contributed the idea of cultural relativism to the literature. Boas's approach focused on the use of documents and informants, whereas, Malinowski stated that a researcher should be engrossed with the work for long periods in the field and do a participant observation by living with the informant and experiencing their way of life, he gives the viewpoint of the native and this became the origin of field work and field methods.

Since Malinowski was very firm with his approach he applied it practically and traveled to Trobriand Island which was located off the eastern coast of New Guinea, he was interested in learning the language of the islanders and stayed there for a long time doing his field work. The field of ethnography became very popular in the late 19th century, as many social scientists gained an interest in studying modern society. Again, in the latter part of the 19th century, the field of anthropology became a good support for scientific formation. Though the field was flourishing it had a lot of threat to encounter. Postcolonialism, the research climate shifted towards post-modernism and feminism. Therefore, the field of anthropology moved into a discipline of social science.

Herodotus known as the Father of History had significant works on the cultures of various peoples beyond the Hellenic realm such as nations in Scythia, which earned him the title "Barbarian Lover" and may have produced the first ethnographic works.

There are different forms of ethnography: confessional ethnography; life history; feminist ethnography etc. Two popular forms of ethnography are realist ethnography and critical ethnography. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 93)

Realist ethnography: is a traditional approach used by cultural anthropologists. Characterized by Van Maanen (1988), it reflects a particular instance taken by the researcher toward the individual being studied. It's an objective study of the situation. It's composed from a third person's perspective by getting the data from the members on the site, the ethnographer stays as omniscient correspondent of actualities out of sight. The realist reports information in a measured style ostensibly uncontaminated by individual predisposition, political objectives, and judgment, the analyst will give a detailed report of the everyday life of the individuals under study. The ethnographer also uses standard categories for cultural description (e.g., family life, communication network). The ethnographer produces the participant's views through closely edited quotations and has the final work on how the culture is to be interpreted and presented. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 93)

Critical ethnography: is a kind of ethnographic research in which the creators advocate for the liberation of groups which are marginalized in society. Critical researchers typically are politically minded people who look to take a stand of opposition to inequality and domination, for example, a critical ethnographer might study schools that provide privileges to certain types of students, or counseling practices that serve to overlook the needs of underrepresented groups. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 94). The important components of a critical ethnographer are to incorporate a value- laden introduction, empower people by giving them more authority, challenging the status quo, and addressing concerns about power and control. A critical ethnographer will study issues of power, empowerment, inequality inequity, dominance, repression, hegemony, and victimization. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 94)

Involves investigation of very few cases, maybe just one case, in detail.

Often involves working with primarily unconstructed data. This data had not been coded at the point of data collection in terms of a closed set of analytic categories.

Emphasizes on exploring social phenomena rather than testing hypotheses.

Data analysis involves interpretation of the functions and meanings of human actions. The product of this is mainly verbal explanations, where statistical analysis and quantification play a subordinate role.

Methodological discussions focus more on questions about how to report findings in the field than on methods of data collection and interpretation.

Ethnographies focus on describing the culture of a group in very detailed and complex manner. The ethnography can be of the entire group or a subpart of it.

It involves engaging in extensive field work where data collection is mainly by interviews, symbols, artifacts, observations, and many other sources of data.

The researcher in ethnography type of research looks for patterns of the group's mental activities, that is their ideas and beliefs expressed through language or other activities, and how they behave in their groups as expressed through their actions that the researcher observed.

In ethnography, the researcher gathers what is available, what is normal, what it is that people do, what they say, and how they work.[10]

Determine if ethnography is the most appropriate design to use to study the research problem. Ethnography is suitable if the needs are to describe how a cultural group works and to explore their beliefs, language, behaviours and also issues faced by the group, such as power, resistance, and dominance. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 94)

Then identify and locate a culture-sharing group to study. This group is one whose members have been together for an extended period of time, so that their shared language, patterns of behaviour and attitudes have merged into discernible patterns, this group can also be a group that has been marginalized by society. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 94)

Select cultural themes, issues or theories to study about the group. These themes, issues, and theories provide an orienting framework for the study of the culture-sharing group, as discussed by Hammersley and Atkinson (2007), Wolcott (1987, 1994b, 2008-1), and Fetterman (2009). The ethnographer begins the study by examining people in interaction in ordinary settings and discerns pervasive patterns such as life cycles, events, and cultural themes. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 94-95)

For studying cultural concepts, determine which type of ethnography to use. Perhaps how the group works need to be described, or a critical ethnography can expose issues such as power, hegemony, and advocacy for certain groups (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 95)

Should collect information in the context or setting where the group works or lives. This is called fieldwork. Types of information typically needed in ethnography are collected by going to the research site, respecting the daily lives of individuals at the site and collecting a wide variety of materials. Field issues of respect, reciprocity, deciding who owns the data and others are central to Ethnography (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 95)

From the many sources collected, the ethnographer analyzes the data for a description of the culture-sharing group, themes that emerge from the group and an overall interpretation (Wolcott, 1994b). The researcher begins to compile a detailed description of the culture-sharing group, by focusing on a single event, on several activities, or on the group over a prolonged period of time.

Forge a working set of rules or generalizations as to how the culture-sharing group works as the final product of this analysis. The final product is a holistic cultural portrait of the group that incorporates the views of the participants (emic) as well as the views of the researcher (etic), it might also advocate for the needs of the group or suggest changes in society. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 96)

It is field-based. It is conducted in the settings in which real people actually live, rather than in laboratories where the researcher controls the elements of the behaviors to be observed or measured.

It is personalized. It is conducted by researchers who are in the day-to-day, face-to-face contact with the people they are studying and who are thus both participants in and observers of the lives under study.

It is multifactorial. It is conducted through the use of two or more data collection techniques - which may be qualitative or quantitative in nature - in order to get a conclusion.

It requires a long-term commitment i.e. it is conducted by a researcher who intends to interact with people they are studying for an extended period of time. The exact time frame can vary from several weeks to a year or more.

It is inductive. It is conducted in such a way to use an accumulation of descriptive detail to build toward general patterns or explanatory theories rather than structured to test hypotheses derived from existing theories or models.

It is dialogic. It is conducted by a researcher whose interpretations and findings may be expounded on by the study’s participants while conclusions are still in the process of formulation.

It is holistic. It is conducted so as to yield the fullest possible portrait of the group under study.

It can also be used in other methodological frameworks, for instance, an action research program of study where one of the goals is to change and improve the situation.[10]

According to the leading social scientist, John Brewer, data collection methods are meant to capture the "social meanings and ordinary activities"[13] of people (informants) in "naturally occurring settings"[13] that are commonly referred to as "the field." The goal is to collect data in such a way that the researcher imposes a minimal amount of personal bias in the data.[13] Multiple methods of data collection may be employed to facilitate a relationship that allows for a more personal and in-depth portrait of the informants and their community, these can include participant observation, field notes, interviews, and surveys.

Interviews are often taped and later transcribed, allowing the interview to proceed unimpaired of note-taking, but with all information available later for full analysis. Secondary research and document analysis are also used to provide insight into the research topic; in the past, kinship charts were commonly used to "discover logical patterns and social structure in non-Western societies".[14] In the 21st century, anthropology focuses more on the study of people in urban settings and the use of kinship charts is seldom employed.

In order to make the data collection and interpretation transparent, researchers creating ethnographies often attempt to be "reflexive". Reflexivity refers to the researcher's aim "to explore the ways in which [the] researcher's involvement with a particular study influences, acts upon and informs such research",[15] despite these attempts of reflexivity, no researcher can be totally unbiased. This factor has provided a basis to criticize ethnography.

Traditionally, the ethnographer focuses attention on a community, selecting knowledgeable informants who know the activities of the community well,[16] these informants are typically asked to identify other informants who represent the community, often using snowball or chain sampling.[16] This process is often effective in revealing common cultural denominators connected to the topic being studied.[16] Ethnography relies greatly on up-close, personal experience. Participation, rather than just observation, is one of the keys to this process.[17] Ethnography is very useful in social research.

Ybema et al. (2010) examine the ontological and epistemological presuppositions underlying ethnography. Ethnographic research can range from a realist perspective, in which behavior is observed, to a constructivist perspective where understanding is socially constructed by the researcher and subjects. Research can range from an objectivist account of fixed, observable behaviors to an interpretive narrative describing "the interplay of individual agency and social structure."[18] Critical theory researchers address "issues of power within the researcher-researched relationships and the links between knowledge and power."

Another form of data collection is that of the "image." The image is the projection that an individual puts on an object or abstract idea. An image can be contained within the physical world through a particular individual's perspective, primarily based on that individual’s past experiences. One example of an image is how an individual views a novel after completing it, the physical entity that is the novel contains a specific image in the perspective of the interpreting individual and can only be expressed by the individual in the terms of "I can tell you what an image is by telling you what it feels like."[19] The idea of an image relies on the imagination and has been seen to be utilized by children in a very spontaneous and natural manner. Effectively, the idea of the image is a primary tool for ethnographers to collect data, the image presents the perspective, experiences, and influences of an individual as a single entity and in consequence, the individual will always contain this image in the group under study.

Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts, which are mostly ethnographies: e.g. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by Bronisław Malinowski, Ethnologische Excursion in Johore (1875) by Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead, The Nuer (1940) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Naven (1936, 1958) by Gregory Bateson, or "The Lele of the Kasai" (1963) by Mary Douglas. Cultural and social anthropologists today place a high value on doing ethnographic research, the typical ethnography is a document written about a particular people, almost always based at least in part on emic views of where the culture begins and ends. Using language or community boundaries to bound the ethnography is common.[22] Ethnographies are also sometimes called "case studies."[23] Ethnographers study and interpret culture, its universalities, and its variations through the ethnographic study based on fieldwork. An ethnography is a specific kind of written observational science which provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community, the fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Neophyte Ethnographers are strongly encouraged to develop extensive familiarity with their subject prior to entering the field; otherwise, they may find themselves in difficult situations.[24]

Ethnographers are participant observers, they take part in events they study because it helps with understanding local behavior and thought. Classic examples are Carol B. Stack's All Our Kin,[25] Jean Briggs' Never in Anger, Richard Lee's Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, Victor Turner's Forest of Symbols, David Maybry-Lewis' Akew-Shavante Society, E.E. Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer, and Claude Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques. Iterations of ethnographic representations in the classic, modernist camp include Joseph W. Bastien's "Drum and Stethoscope" (1992), Bartholomew Dean's recent (2009) contribution, Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia.[26]

A typical ethnography attempts to be holistic[7][8] and typically follows an outline to include a brief history of the culture in question, an analysis of the physical geography or terrain inhabited by the people under study, including climate, and often including what biological anthropologists call habitat. Folk notions of botany and zoology are presented as ethnobotany and ethnozoology alongside references from the formal sciences. Material culture, technology, and means of subsistence are usually treated next, as they are typically bound up in physical geography and include descriptions of infrastructure. Kinship and social structure (including age grading, peer groups, gender, voluntary associations, clans, moieties, and so forth, if they exist) are typically included. Languages spoken, dialects, and the history of language change are another group of standard topics.[27] Practices of childrearing, acculturation, and emic views on personality and values usually follow after sections on social structure.[28] Rites, rituals, and other evidence of religion have long been an interest and are sometimes central to ethnographies, especially when conducted in public where visiting anthropologists can see them.[29]

As ethnography developed, anthropologists grew more interested in less tangible aspects of culture, such as values, worldview and what Clifford Geertz termed the "ethos" of the culture; in his fieldwork, Geertz used elements of a phenomenological approach, tracing not just the doings of people, but the cultural elements themselves. For example, if within a group of people, winking was a communicative gesture, he sought to first determine what kinds of things a wink might mean (it might mean several things). Then, he sought to determine in what contexts winks were used, and whether, as one moved about a region, winks remained meaningful in the same way; in this way, cultural boundaries of communication could be explored, as opposed to using linguistic boundaries or notions about the residence. Geertz, while still following something of a traditional ethnographic outline, moved outside that outline to talk about "webs" instead of "outlines"[30] of culture.

Within cultural anthropology, there are several subgenres of ethnography. Beginning in the 1950s and early 1960s, anthropologists began writing "bio-confessional" ethnographies that intentionally exposed the nature of ethnographic research. Famous examples include Tristes Tropiques (1955) by Lévi-Strauss, The High Valley by Kenneth Read, and The Savage and the Innocent by David Maybury-Lewis, as well as the mildly fictionalized Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (Laura Bohannan).

Later "reflexive" ethnographies refined the technique to translate cultural differences by representing their effects on the ethnographer. Famous examples include Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight by Clifford Geertz, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco by Paul Rabinow, The Headman and I by Jean-Paul Dumont, and Tuhami by Vincent Crapanzano. In the 1980s, the rhetoric of ethnography was subjected to intense scrutiny within the discipline, under the general influence of literary theory and post-colonial/post-structuralist thought. "Experimental" ethnographies that reveal the ferment of the discipline include Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig, Debating Muslims by Michael F. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, A Space on the Side of the Road by Kathleen Stewart, and Advocacy after Bhopal by Kim Fortun.

This critical turn in sociocultural anthropology during the mid-1980s can be traced to the influence of the now classic (and often contested) text, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, (1986) edited by James Clifford and George Marcus. Writing Culture helped bring changes to both anthropology and ethnography often described in terms of being 'postmodern,' 'reflexive,' 'literary,' 'deconstructive,' or 'poststructural' in nature, in that the text helped to highlight the various epistemic and political predicaments that many practitioners saw as plaguing ethnographic representations and practices.[31]

Where Geertz's and Turner's interpretive anthropology recognized subjects as creative actors who constructed their sociocultural worlds out of symbols, postmodernists attempted to draw attention to the privileged status of the ethnographers themselves, that is, the ethnographer cannot escape the personal viewpoint in creating an ethnographic account, thus making any claims of objective neutrality highly problematic, if not altogether impossible.[32] In regards to this last point, Writing Culture became a focal point for looking at how ethnographers could describe different cultures and societies without denying the subjectivity of those individuals and groups being studied while simultaneously doing so without laying claim to absolute knowledge and objective authority.[33] Along with the development of experimental forms such as 'dialogic anthropology,' 'narrative ethnography,'[34] and 'literary ethnography',[35]Writing Culture helped to encourage the development of 'collaborative ethnography.'[36] This exploration of the relationship between writer, audience, and subject has become a central tenet of contemporary anthropological and ethnographic practice; in certain instances, active collaboration between the researcher(s) and subject(s) has helped blend the practice of collaboration in ethnographic fieldwork with the process of creating the ethnographic product resulting from the research.[36][37][38]

Jaber F. Gubrium's series of organizational ethnographies focused on the everyday practices of illness, care, and recovery are notable, they include Living and Dying at Murray Manor, which describes the social worlds of a nursing home; Describing Care: Image and Practice in Rehabilitation, which documents the social organization of patient subjectivity in a physical rehabilitation hospital; Caretakers: Treating Emotionally Disturbed Children, which features the social construction of behavioral disorders in children; and Oldtimers and Alzheimer's: The Descriptive Organization of Senility, which describes how the Alzheimer's disease movement constructed a new subjectivity of senile dementia and how that is organized in a geriatric hospital. Another approach to ethnography in sociology comes in the form of institutional ethnography, developed by Dorothy E. Smith for studying the social relations which structure people's everyday lives.

Other notable ethnographies include Paul Willis's Learning to Labour, on working class youth; the work of Elijah Anderson, Mitchell Duneier, and Loïc Wacquant on black America, and Lai Olurode's Glimpses of Madrasa From Africa. But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography is not the sine qua non of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology.

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, ethnographic research methods began to be widely used by communication scholars, as the purpose of ethnography is to describe and interpret the shared and learned patterns of values, behaviors, beliefs, and language of a culture-sharing group, Harris, (1968), also Agar (1980) note that ethnography is both a process and an outcome of the research. Studies such as Gerry Philipsen's analysis of cultural communication strategies in a blue-collar, working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Speaking 'Like a Man' in Teamsterville, paved the way for the expansion of ethnographic research in the study of communication.

Scholars of communication studies use ethnographic research methods to analyze communicative behaviors and phenomena, this is often characterized in the writing as attempts to understand taken-for-granted routines by which working definitions are socially produced. Ethnography as a method is a storied, careful, and systematic examination of the reality-generating mechanisms of everyday life (Coulon, 1995). Ethnographic work in communication studies seeks to explain "how" ordinary methods/practices/performances construct the ordinary actions used by ordinary people in the accomplishments of their identities, this often gives the perception of trying to answer the "why" and "how come" questions of human communication.[39] Often this type of research results in a case study or field study such as an analysis of speech patterns at a protest rally, or the way firemen communicate during "down time" at a fire station. Like anthropology scholars, communication scholars often immerse themselves, and participate in and/or directly observe the particular social group being studied.[40]

The American anthropologist George Spindler was a pioneer in applying the ethnographic methodology to the classroom.

Anthropologists such as Daniel Miller and Mary Douglas have used ethnographic data to answer academic questions about consumers and consumption; in this sense, Tony Salvador, Genevieve Bell, and Ken Anderson describe design ethnography as being "a way of understanding the particulars of daily life in such a way as to increase the success probability of a new product or service or, more appropriately, to reduce the probability of failure specifically due to a lack of understanding of the basic behaviors and frameworks of consumers."[41] Sociologist Sam Ladner argues in her book,[42] that understanding consumers and their desires requires a shift in "standpoint," one that only ethnography provides, the results are products and services that respond to consumers' unmet needs.

Businesses, too, have found ethnographers helpful for understanding how people use products and services. Companies make increasing use of ethnographic methods to understand consumers and consumption, or for new product development (such as video ethnography), the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC) conference is evidence of this. Ethnographers' systematic and holistic approach to real-life experience is valued by product developers, who use the method to understand unstated desires or cultural practices that surround products. Where focus groups fail to inform marketers about what people really do, ethnography links what people say to what they do—avoiding the pitfalls that come from relying only on self-reported, focus-group data.

The Ethnographic methodology is not usually evaluated in terms of philosophical standpoint (such as positivism and emotionalism). Ethnographic studies need to be evaluated in some manner. No consensus has been developed on evaluation standards, but Richardson (2000, p. 254)[43] provides five criteria that ethnographers might find helpful. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein's (1997) monograph, The New Language of Qualitative Method, discusses forms of ethnography in terms of their "methods talk."

Substantive contribution: "Does the piece contribute to our understanding of social life?"

Aesthetic merit: "Does this piece succeed aesthetically?"

Reflexivity: "How did the author come to write this text…Is there adequate self-awareness and self-exposure for the reader to make judgments about the point of view?"[44]

Ethnography, which is a method dedicated entirely to field work, is aimed at gaining a deeper insight of a certain people's knowledge and social culture.

Ethnography's advantages are:

It can open up certain experiences during group research that other research methods fail to cover.

Notions that are taken for granted can be highlighted and confronted.

It can tap into intuitive and deep human understanding of and interpretations of (by the ethnographer) the accounts of informants (those who are being studied), which goes far beyond what quantitative research can do in terms of extracting meanings.

Ethnography allows people outside of a culture (whether of a primitive tribe or of a corporation's employees) to learn about its members' practices, motives, understandings, and values.

However, there are certain challenges or limitations for the ethnographic method:

Deep expertise is required: Ethnographers must accumulate knowledge about the methods and domains of interest, which can take considerable training and time.

Sensitivity: The ethnographer is an outsider and must exercise discretion and caution to avoid offending, alienating or harming those being observed.

Access: Negotiating access to field sites and participants can be time-consuming and difficult. Secretive or guarded organizations may require different approaches in order for researchers to succeed.[45]

Duration and cost: Research can involve prolonged time in the field, particularly because building trust with participants is usually necessary for obtaining rich data.

Bias: Ethnographers bring their own experience to bear in pursuing questions to ask and reviewing data, which can lead to biases in directions of inquiry and analysis.

Descriptive approach: Ethnography relies heavily on storytelling and the presentation of critical incidents, which is inevitably selective and viewed as a weakness by those used to the scientific approaches of hypothesis testing, quantification and replication.

Gary Alan Fine argues that the nature of ethnographic inquiry demands that researchers deviate from formal and idealistic rules or ethics that have come to be widely accepted in qualitative and quantitative approaches in research. Many of these ethical assumptions are rooted in positivist and post-positivist epistemologies that have adapted over time but are apparent and must be accounted for in all research paradigms, these ethical dilemmas are evident throughout the entire process of conducting ethnographies, including the design, implementation, and reporting of an ethnographic study. Essentially, Fine maintains that researchers are typically not as ethical as they claim or assume to be — and that "each job includes ways of doing things that would be inappropriate for others to know".[46]

Fine is not necessarily casting blame at ethnographic researchers but tries to show that researchers often make idealized ethical claims and standards which in are inherently based on partial truths and self-deceptions. Fine also acknowledges that many of these partial truths and self-deceptions are unavoidable, he maintains that "illusions" are essential to maintain an occupational reputation and avoid potentially more caustic consequences. He claims, "Ethnographers cannot help but lie, but in lying, we reveal truths that escape those who are not so bold".[47] Based on these assertions, Fine establishes three conceptual clusters in which ethnographic ethical dilemmas can be situated: "Classic Virtues", "Technical Skills", and "Ethnographic Self".

Much debate surrounding the issue of ethics arose following revelations about how the ethnographer Napoleon Chagnon conducted his ethnographic fieldwork with the Yanomani people of South America.

While there is no international standard on Ethnographic Ethics, many western anthropologists look to the American Anthropological Association for guidance when conducting ethnographic work;[48] in 2009 the Association adopted a code of ethics, stating: Anthropologists have "moral obligations as members of other groups, such as the family, religion, and community, as well as the profession".[49] The code of ethics notes that anthropologists are part of a wider scholarly and political network, as well as human and natural environment, which needs to be reported on respectfully,[49] the code of ethics recognizes that sometimes very close and personal relationship can sometimes develop from doing ethnographic work.[49] The Association acknowledges that the code is limited in scope; ethnographic work can sometimes be multidisciplinary, and anthropologists need to be familiar with ethics and perspectives of other disciplines as well.[50] The eight-page code of ethics outlines ethical considerations for those conducting Research, Teaching, Application and Dissemination of Results, which are briefly outlined below.[51]

Conducting Research-When conducting research Anthropologists need to be aware of the potential impacts of the research on the people and animals they study.[52] If the seeking of new knowledge will negatively impact the people and animals they will be studying they may not undertake the study according to the code of ethics.[52]

Teaching-When teaching the discipline of anthropology, instructors are required to inform students of the ethical dilemmas of conducting ethnographies and field work.[53]

Application-When conducting an ethnography, Anthropologists must be "open with funders, colleagues, persons studied or providing information, and relevant parties affected by the work about the purpose(s), potential impacts, and source(s) of support for the work."[54]

Dissemination of Results-When disseminating results of an ethnography, "[a]nthropologists have an ethical obligation to consider the potential impact of both their research and the communication or dissemination of the results of their research on all directly or indirectly involved."[55] Research results of ethnographies should not be withheld from participants in the research if that research is being observed by other people.[54]

"The kindly ethnographer" – Most ethnographers present themselves as being more sympathetic than they are, which aids in the research process, but is also deceptive. The identity that we present to subjects is different from who we are in other circumstances.

"The friendly ethnographer" – Ethnographers operate under the assumption that they should not dislike anyone. When ethnographers find they intensely dislike individuals encountered in the research, they may crop them out of the findings.[56]

"The honest ethnographer" – If research participants know the research goals, their responses will likely be skewed. Therefore, ethnographers often conceal what they know in order to increase the likelihood of acceptance by participants.[56]

"The Precise Ethnographer" – Ethnographers often create the illusion that field notes are data and reflect what "really" happened. They engage in the opposite of plagiarism, giving undeserved credit through loose interpretations and paraphrasing. Researchers take near-fictions and turn them into claims of fact, the closest ethnographers can ever really get to reality is an approximate truth.

"The Observant Ethnographer" – Readers of ethnography are often led to assume the report of a scene is complete – that little of importance was missed. In reality, an ethnographer will always miss some aspect because of lacking omniscience. Everything is open to multiple interpretations and misunderstandings, as ethnographers' skills in observation and collection of data vary by individual, what is depicted in ethnography can never be the whole picture.

"The Unobtrusive Ethnographer" – As a "participant" in the scene, the researcher will always have an effect on the communication that occurs within the research site. The degree to which one is an "active member" affects the extent to which sympathetic understanding is possible.[57]

"The Candid Ethnographer" – Where the researcher personally situates within the ethnography is ethically problematic. There is an illusion that everything reported was observed by the researcher.

"The Chaste Ethnographer" – When ethnographers participate within the field, they invariably develop relationships with research subjects/participants. These relationships are sometimes not accounted for within the reporting of the ethnography, although they may influence the research findings.

"The Fair Ethnographer" – Fine claims that objectivity is an illusion and that everything in ethnography is known from a perspective. Therefore, it is unethical for a researcher to report fairness in findings.

"The Literary Ethnographer" – Representation is a balancing act of determining what to "show" through poetic/prosaic language and style, versus what to "tell" via straightforward, 'factual' reporting. The individual skills of an ethnographer influence what appears to be the value of the research.[58]

According to Norman K. Denzin, ethnographers should consider the following eight principles when observing, recording, and sampling data:

The groups should combine symbolic meanings with patterns of interaction.

Observe the world from the point of view of the subject, while maintaining the distinction between everyday and scientific perceptions of reality.

Link the group's symbols and their meanings with the social relationships.

Record all behavior.

The methodology should highlight phases of process, change, and stability.

^For post-colonial critiques of ethnography from various locations, see essays in Prem Poddar et al, Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures--Continental Europe and its Empires, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

Ethnography (journal)
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Ethnography is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering the field of ethnography. The editors-in-chief are Jan Willem Duyvendak, Peter Geschiere, and Paul Willis and it was established in 2000 and is published by Sage Publications. The journal is abstracted and indexed in Scopus and the Social Sciences Citation Index, according to the Journal Cita

1.
Ethnography

Anthropology
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Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies, linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the development of humans. The abstract noun anthropology is fi

1.
Forensic anthropologists can help identify skeletonized human remains, such as these found lying in scrub in Western Australia, c. 1900–1910.

History of anthropology
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History of anthropology in this article refers primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. The term anthropology itself, innovated as a New Latin scientific word during the Renaissance, has meant the study of man. The topics to be included and the terminology have varied historically, at present they are more elaborat

1.
Illustration from Darwin's Origin of Species.

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Cannibalism among "the savages" in Brazil, as described and pictured by André Thévet

Archaeology
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Archaeology, or archeology, is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. In North America, archaeology is considered a sub-field of anthropo

Biological anthropology
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It is a subfield of anthropology that provides a biological perspective to the systematic study of human beings. As a subfield of anthropology, biological anthropology itself is divided into several branches. All branches are united in their application of evolutionary theory to understanding human morphology. Primatology, the study of primate beha

Cultural anthropology
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Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of the anthropological constant, a variety of methods are involved in cultural anthropological, including participant observation, interviews, and surveys

3.
Franz Boas, one of the pioneers of modern anthropology, often called the "Father of American Anthropology"

4.
Margaret Mead (1901-1978)

Social anthropology
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In the USA, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology. Differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue, Social and cultural anthropologists, and some who integrate the two, are found in most institutes of anthropology. Thus the formal names of institut

3.
Bronislaw Malinowski, Anthropologist at the London School of Economics

4.
The main LSE entrance

Aerial archaeology
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Aerial archaeology is the study of archaeological remains by examining them from altitude. Early investigators attempted to gain birdseye views of sites using hot air balloons, photographs may be taken either vertically, that is from directly overhead, or obliquely, meaning that they are taken at an angle. In order to provide an effect, an overlapp

3.
Low-level, near infra-red kite aerial photo of the site of Ogilface Castle, West Lothian. This image shows features not visible to the naked eye, including tyre tracks on this short, grazed grass.

Aviation archaeology
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Aviation archaeology is a recognized sub-discipline within archaeology and underwater archaeology as a whole. It is an activity practiced by enthusiasts and academics in pursuit of finding, documenting, recovering, and preserving sites important in aviation history. For the most part, these sites are aircraft wrecks and crash sites, the activity da

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The remains of a Royal Canadian Air Force DC-3 Dakota crashed on January 19. 1946.

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B-17 turbocharger, crash debris

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Measure, photograph and log aircraft debris.

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B-17 crash debris.

Biblical archaeology
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For the movement associated with William F. Albright and also known as biblical archaeology, see Biblical archaeology school. The principal location of interest is what is known in the relevant religions as the Holy Land, the scientific techniques used are the same as those used in general archaeology, such as excavation and radiocarbon dating. Bib

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Mosaic from a Byzantine Church dating from the 5th century. Mosaics are one of the main elements studied by biblical archaeology.

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The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, holds valuable resources for both scientific and biblical research and exploration.

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The territory known as the Middle East was without doubt the location of the events that inspired the writing of the biblical texts.

Forensic anthropology
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Forensic anthropology is the application of the anatomical science of anthropology and its various subfields, including forensic archaeology and forensic taphonomy, in a legal setting. A forensic anthropologist can assist in the identification of deceased individuals whose remains are decomposed, burned, mutilated or otherwise unrecognizable, Foren

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Exhumed bodies of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide in a mass grave found in 2007.

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The examination of remains can help build a peri and post-mortem profile of the individual.

Maritime archaeology
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A specialty within maritime archaeology is nautical archaeology, which studies vessel construction and use. As with archaeology as a whole, maritime archaeology can be practised within the historical, industrial, an associated discipline, and again one that lies within archaeology itself, is underwater archaeology, which studies the past through an

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A maritime archaeologist with the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program in St. Augustine, Florida, recording the ship's bell discovered on the 18th century "Storm Wreck."

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The final phases of the salvage of the Mary Rose on October 11, 1982.

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The bow of Vasa, a Swedish warship that foundered and sank on its maiden voyage in 1628. It was salvaged in 1961 and is now on permanent display at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm.

Paleoethnobotany
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Paleoethnobotany or Archaeobotany, is the study of remains of plants cultivated or used by man in ancient times, which have survived in archaeological contexts. Paleoethnobotany is the archaeological sub-field that studies plant remains from archaeological sites, Plant macrofossils are preserved through four main modes of preservation at archaeolog

1.
Flotation machine in use at Hallan Çemi, southeast Turkey, c. 1990. Note the two sieves catching charred seeds and charcoal, and the bags of archaeological matrix waiting for flotation. Photo: Mark Nesbitt

Zooarchaeology
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Zooarchaeology is the study of faunal remains. Faunal remains are the left behind when an animal dies. It includes, bones, shells, hair, chitin, scales, hides, proteins, of these items, bones and shells are the ones that occur most frequently at archaeological sites where faunal remains can be found. Much of the time, most of the remains do not sur

1.
Egyptian mummy of a dog front and profile views

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A reference collection of shinbones (Tibia) of different animal species helps determining old bones. Dutch Heritage Agency.

Anthrozoology
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Anthrozoology is the subset of ethnobiology that deals with interactions between humans and other animals. It is a field that overlaps with other disciplines including anthropology, ethnology, medicine, psychology, veterinary medicine. A major focus of research is the quantifying of the positive effects of human-animal relationships on either party

Evolutionary anthropology
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Evolutionary anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of the evolution of human physiology and human behaviour and the relation between hominids and non-hominid primates. Evolutionary anthropology is based in science and social science. Various fields and disciplines of evolutionary anthropology are, Human evolution, primatology and primate etho

Molecular anthropology
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Generally, comparisons are made between sequence, either DNA or protein sequence, however early studies used comparative serology. By examining DNA sequences in different populations, scientists can determine the closeness of relationships between populations, Molecular anthropology has been extremely useful in establishing the evolutionary tree of

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Image of mitochondrion. There are many mitochondria within a cell, and DNA in them replicates independently of the chromosomes in the nucleus.

Neuroanthropology
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Neuroanthropology is the study of the relationship between culture and the brain. Neuroanthropology explores how the brain gives rise to culture, how culture influences brain development, structure and function, moreover, neuroanthropologists consider how new findings in the brain sciences help us understand the interactive effects of culture and b

Palaeoanthropology
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Hominoids are a primate superfamily, the hominid family is currently considered to comprise both the great ape lineages and human lineages within the hominoid superfamily. The Homininae comprise both the human lineages and the African ape lineages, the term African apes refers only to chimpanzees and gorillas. The terminology of the biological fami

Primatology
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Primatology is the scientific study of primates. There are two centers of primatology, Western primatology and Japanese primatology. These two divergent disciplines stem from their cultural backgrounds and philosophies that went into their founding. Although, fundamentally, both Western and Japanese primatology share many of the principles, the are

Anthropology of development
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The anthropology of development is a term applied to a body of anthropological work which views development from a critical perspective. The kind of issues addressed, and implications for the approach typically adopted can be gleaned from a list questions posed by Gow and these questions involve anthropologists asking why, if a key development goal

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Location of Lesotho in South Africa

Ecological anthropology
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Ecological anthropology is a sub-field of anthropology and is defined as the “study of cultural adaptations to environments”. The sub-field is also defined as, the study of relationships between a population of humans and their biophysical environment. ”Ecological anthropology developed from the approach of cultural ecology, research pursued under

Environmental anthropology
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Environmental anthropology is a sub-specialty within the field of anthropology that takes an active role in examining the relationships between humans and their environment across space and time. The sixties was a decade for environmental anthropology, with functionalism. The rudiments of the theories can be seen in Marcel Mauss Seasonal Variation

Economic anthropology
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Economic anthropology is a field that attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a relationship with the discipline of economics. For the most part, studies in economic anthropology focus on exchange, in contrast, the Marxian school known as political

1.
Bronislaw Malinowski, anthropologist at the London School of Economics

Political economy in anthropology
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Political Economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture. Political Economy was introduced in American anthropology primarily through the support of Julian Steward, steward’s research interests centered on “subsistence” — the dynamic interaction of man, environment, te

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Dobe!Kung men lighting a fire.

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Cecil Rhodes, driving force of British imperialism in Africa

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Cambodian rice farming

Kinship
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Anthropologist Robin Fox states that the study of kinship is the study of what man does with these basic facts of life – mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship etc. Human society is unique, he argues, in that we are working with the raw material as exists in the animal world. These social ends include the socialization of childre

Ethnomusicology
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Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. Stated broadly, ethnomusicology may be described as an investigation of music in its cultural contexts. When the field first came into existence, it was limited to the study of non-Western music—in contrast to the study of Western art music. Over t

Sociolinguistics
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Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It is historically related to linguistic anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has even been questioned. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, the study of the social motivation of language change,

1.
Topics and terminology

Anthropometry
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Anthropometry refers to the measurement of the human individual. Anthropometry involves the measurement of the physical properties of the human body, primarily dimensional descriptors of body size. Changes in lifestyles, nutrition, and ethnic composition of lead to changes in the distribution of body dimensions. Due to methodological and practical

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The field of ergonomics employs anthropometry to optimize human interaction with equipment and workplaces.

Ethnology
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Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationship between them. The term ethnologia is credited to Adam Franz Kollár who used and defined it in his Historiae ivrisqve pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates published in Vienna in 1783, the distinction between the three terms

Reflexivity (social theory)
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Reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a relationship in which neither can be assigned as causes or effects. In sociology, reflexivity therefore comes to mean an act of self-reference where examination or action bend

Culture
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Culture can be defined in numerous ways. In the words of anthropologist E. B, Tylor, it is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is the way of life, especially the customs and bel

Ethnic group
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An ethnic group or ethnicity is a category of people who identify with each other based on similarities, such as common ancestral, language, social, cultural or national experiences. Unlike other social groups, ethnicity is often an inherited status based on the society in which one lives, in some cases, it can be adopted if a person moves into ano

3.
Some European ethnic groups, such as Basque people, do not constitute a majority in any one country.

Evolution
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Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to biodiversity at every level of organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms. In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the LUCA of all living on Earth. The

Sociocultural evolution
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Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or cultural evolution are theories of cultural and social evolution that describe how cultures and societies change over time. Sociocultural evolution is the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, another attempt, on a less systematic scale, originated with the world-

Meme
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A meme, a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous

Prehistory
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Prehistory means literally before history, from the Latin word for before, præ, and Greek ιστορία. Neighbouring civilisations were the first to follow, most other civilisations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age. The period when a culture is written about by others, but has not developed its own writing is known as the protohistory o

1.
Massive stone pillars at Göbekli Tepe, in southeast Turkey, erected for ritual use by early Neolithic people 11,000 years ago.

Race (human classification)
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Race is the classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, ancestry, genetics, or social relations, or the relations between them. First used to refer to speakers of a language and then to denote national affiliations. The term was used in a general biological taxonomic sense, starting from the 19th century. Social conceptions and g

Society
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In the social sciences, a larger society often evinces stratification or dominance patterns in subgroups. A society can also consist of like-minded people governed by their own norms and values within a dominant and this is sometimes referred to as a subculture, a term used extensively within criminology. The term society came from the Latin word s

1.
A half-section of the 12th-century South Tang Dynasty version of Night Revels of Han Xizai, original by Gu Hongzhong. The painting portrays servants, musicians, monks, children, guests, and hosts all in a single social environment. It serves as an in-depth look into the Chinese social structure of the time.

3.
The social group enables its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis. Both individual and social (common) goals can thus be distinguished and considered. Ant (formicidae) social ethology.

Colonialism
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Colonialism is the establishment of a colony in one territory by a political power from another territory, and the subsequent maintenance, expansion, and exploitation of that colony. The term is used to describe a set of unequal relationships between the colonial power and the colony and often between the colonists and the indigenous peoples. The E

4.
Colonial Governor of the Seychelles inspecting police guard of honour in 1972

Postcolonialism
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Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is an academic discipline that analyzes, explains, and responds to the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism speaks about the consequences of external control and economic exploitation of native people. As a genre of history, postcolonialism questions and reinvents the manner in whic

Culture theory
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Culture theory is the branch of comparative anthropology and semiotics that seeks to define the heuristic concept of culture in operational and/or scientific terms. In the 19th century, culture was used by some to refer to an array of human activities. In the 20th century, anthropologists began theorizing about culture as an object of scientific an

1.
Sub-fields

Trans-cultural diffusion
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It is distinct from the diffusion of innovations within a specific culture. Examples of diffusion include the spread of the war chariot and iron smelting in ancient times, and this can include hierarchical, stimulus, and contagious diffusion. Relocation diffusion, an idea or innovation that migrates into new areas, hierarchical diffusion, an idea o

Boasian anthropology
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Boasian anthropology was a school within American anthropology founded by Franz Boas in the late 19th century. It was based on the model of anthropology uniting the fields of cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, physical anthropology. In this way Boasian anthropologists did not assume as a given that non-Western societies are necessarily

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"Franz Boas posing for figure in US Natural History Museum exhibit entitled "Hamats'a coming out of secret room" 1895 or before. Courtesy of National Anthropology Archives. (Kwakiutl culture)

4.
Drawing of a Kwakiutl mask from Boas's The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897). Wooden skulls hang from below the mask, which represents one of the cannibal bird helpers of Bakbakwalinooksiwey.

Structural functionalism
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Structural functionalism, or simply functionalism, is a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. This approach looks at society through an orientation, which is a broad focus on the social structures that shape society as a whole. This approach looks at both s

Post-structuralism
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Existential phenomenology is a significant influence, Colin Davis has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called post-phenomenologists. Post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault did not form a self-conscious group, Structuralism rejected the phenomenological idea that knowledge could be centred on the human k

List of indigenous peoples
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This is a partial list of the worlds indigenous / aboriginal / native people. e. Note that this is a listing of peoples, groups and communities, many of the names are externally imposed, and are not those the people identify within their cultures. As John Trudell observed, They change our name and treat us the same, basic to the unethical treatment

Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Li

Cultural
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Culture can be defined in numerous ways. In the words of anthropologist E. B, Tylor, it is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is the way of life, especially the customs and bel

Social sciences
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Social science is a major category of academic disciplines, concerned with society and the relationships among individuals within a society. It in turn has many branches, each of which is considered a social science, the social sciences include economics, political science, human geography, demography, psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeolo

2.
Masonic temple, constructed 1819 in Aurora. After "the Morgan Affair", the building was not used for freemasonry from 1827-1846. The Gordian Knot met on the second floor in the early 1840s. In 1847 the Scipio Lodge #110 started Masonic activities again.

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"Franz Boas posing for figure in US Natural History Museum exhibit entitled "Hamats'a coming out of secret room" 1895 or before. Courtesy of National Anthropology Archives. (Kwakiutl culture)

4.
Drawing of a Kwakiutl mask from Boas's The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897). Wooden skulls hang from below the mask, which represents one of the cannibal bird helpers of Bakbakwalinooksiwey.

2.
Contemporary depiction of the main building of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. Plate entitled Cross-section of the imperial library and art room towards morning, taken from a series of twelve etchings published in 1741. They were the first collaborative work from the workshops of the St. Petersburg academy.

1.
Ethnography (journal)
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Ethnography is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering the field of ethnography. The editors-in-chief are Jan Willem Duyvendak, Peter Geschiere, and Paul Willis and it was established in 2000 and is published by Sage Publications. The journal is abstracted and indexed in Scopus and the Social Sciences Citation Index, according to the Journal Citation Reports, its 2014 impact factor is 1.041

Ethnography (journal)
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Ethnography

2.
Anthropology
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Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies, linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the development of humans. The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history and its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their New Latin anthropologia derived from the forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos and lógos. It began to be used in English, possibly via French anthropologie, various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had already been formed. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use Ethnology, was formed in 1839 and its members were primarily anti-slavery activists. When slavery was abolished in France in 1848 the Société was abandoned and these anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights activists. Anthropology and many other current fields are the results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century. For them, the publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect, Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild. Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s, there was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. When he read Darwin he became a convert to Transformisme. His definition now became the study of the group, considered as a whole, in its details. Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech and he wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He discovered the speech center of the brain, today called Brocas area after him. The title was translated as The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples. The last two volumes were published posthumously, Waitz defined anthropology as the science of the nature of man. By nature he meant matter animated by the Divine breath, i. e. he was an animist and he stresses that the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation

Anthropology
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Forensic anthropologists can help identify skeletonized human remains, such as these found lying in scrub in Western Australia, c. 1900–1910.
Anthropology
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Anthropology
Anthropology
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Excavations at the 3800-year-old Edgewater Park Site, Iowa

3.
History of anthropology
–
History of anthropology in this article refers primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. The term anthropology itself, innovated as a New Latin scientific word during the Renaissance, has meant the study of man. The topics to be included and the terminology have varied historically, at present they are more elaborate than they were during the development of anthropology. For a presentation of social and cultural anthropology as they have developed in Britain, France. The term anthropology ostensibly is a compound of Greek ἄνθρωπος anthrōpos, human being. The compound, however, is unknown in ancient Greek or Latin and it first appears sporadically in the scholarly Latin anthropologia of Renaissance France, where it spawns the French word anthropologie, transferred into English as anthropology. It does belong to a class of words produced with the suffix, such as archeo-logy, bio-logy, etc. “the study of. ”The mixed character of Greek anthropos. There is no independent noun, logia, however, of meaning in classical Greek. The word λόγος has that meaning, James Hunt attempted to rescue the etymology in his first address to the Anthropological Society of London as president and founder,1863. He did find an anthropologos from Aristotle in the standard ancient Greek Lexicon, which he defines the word as “speaking or treating of man. ”This view is entirely wishful thinking, as Liddell and Scott go on to explain the meaning, “i. e. fond of personal conversation. ”If Aristotle. The lack of any ancient denotation of anthropology, however, is not an etymological problem, Liddell and Scott list 170 Greek compounds ending in –logia, enough to justify its later use as a productive suffix. The ancient Greeks often used suffixes in forming compounds that had no independent variant, the etymological dictionaries are united in attributing –logia to logos, from legein, “to collect. ”The thing collected is primarily ideas, especially in speech. The American Heritage Dictionary says, “ derivatives independently built to logos, marvin Harris, a historian of anthropology, begins The Rise of Anthropological Theory with the statement that anthropology is “the science of history. Just as natural history comprises the characteristics of organisms past and present, so cultural or social history comprises the characteristics of society past and it includes both documented history and prehistory, but its slant is toward institutional development rather than particular non-repeatable historical events. According to Harris, the 19th-century anthropologists were theorizing under the presumption that the development of society followed some sort of laws and he decries the loss of that view in the 20th century by the denial that any laws are discernable or that current institutions have any bearing on ancient. He coins the term ideographic for them, the 19th-century views, on the other hand, are nomothetic, that is, they provide laws. He intends “to reassert the methodological priority of the search for the laws of history in the science of man. ”He is looking for “a general theory of history. ”The use of “tends to” implies some degree of freedom to happen or not happen, but in strict determinism, given certain causes, the result and only that result must occur. Different philosophers, however, use determinism in different senses. ”Institutions are not a physical reality, when they act in society, they do so according to the laws of history, of which they are not aware, hence, there is no historical element of free will

History of anthropology
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Illustration from Darwin's Origin of Species.
History of anthropology
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Cannibalism among "the savages" in Brazil, as described and pictured by André Thévet
History of anthropology
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Table of natural history, 1728 Cyclopaedia
History of anthropology
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E. B. Tylor, nineteenth-century British anthropologist

4.
Archaeology
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Archaeology, or archeology, is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. In North America, archaeology is considered a sub-field of anthropology, archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology as a field is distinct from the discipline of palaeontology, Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for whom there may be no written records to study. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the advent of literacy in societies across the world, Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time. The discipline involves surveying, excavation and eventually analysis of data collected to learn more about the past, in broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Archaeology developed out of antiquarianism in Europe during the 19th century, Archaeology has been used by nation-states to create particular visions of the past. Nonetheless, today, archaeologists face many problems, such as dealing with pseudoarchaeology, the looting of artifacts, a lack of public interest, the science of archaeology grew out of the older multi-disciplinary study known as antiquarianism. Antiquarians studied history with attention to ancient artifacts and manuscripts. Tentative steps towards the systematization of archaeology as a science took place during the Enlightenment era in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, in Europe, philosophical interest in the remains of Greco-Roman civilization and the rediscovery of classical culture began in the late Middle Age. Antiquarians, including John Leland and William Camden, conducted surveys of the English countryside, one of the first sites to undergo archaeological excavation was Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments in England. John Aubrey was a pioneer archaeologist who recorded numerous megalithic and other monuments in southern England. He was also ahead of his time in the analysis of his findings and he attempted to chart the chronological stylistic evolution of handwriting, medieval architecture, costume, and shield-shapes. Excavations were also carried out in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum and these excavations began in 1748 in Pompeii, while in Herculaneum they began in 1738. The discovery of entire towns, complete with utensils and even human shapes, however, prior to the development of modern techniques, excavations tended to be haphazard, the importance of concepts such as stratification and context were overlooked. The father of archaeological excavation was William Cunnington and he undertook excavations in Wiltshire from around 1798, funded by Sir Richard Colt Hoare. Cunnington made meticulous recordings of neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, one of the major achievements of 19th century archaeology was the development of stratigraphy. The idea of overlapping strata tracing back to successive periods was borrowed from the new geological and paleontological work of scholars like William Smith, James Hutton, the application of stratigraphy to archaeology first took place with the excavations of prehistorical and Bronze Age sites

5.
Biological anthropology
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It is a subfield of anthropology that provides a biological perspective to the systematic study of human beings. As a subfield of anthropology, biological anthropology itself is divided into several branches. All branches are united in their application of evolutionary theory to understanding human morphology. Primatology, the study of primate behavior, morphology. Reasons via homology and analogy to infer how and why similar human traits evolved, human behavioral ecology, the study of behavioral adaptations from the evolutionary and ecologic perspectives. Human adaptation, the study of human responses to environmental stresses. Bioarchaeology, the study of past human cultures through examination of human remains recovered in an archaeological context, the examined human remains usually comprises bones, but may include preserved soft tissue. Researchers in bioarchaeology combine the skillsets of human osteology, paleopathology, and archaeology, paleopathology is the study of disease in antiquity. Scientific physical anthropology began in the 18th century with the study of racial classification, the first prominent physical anthropologist, the German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, amassed a large collection of human skulls. In 1897 Columbia University appointed Franz Boas as a physical anthropologist for his expertise in measuring schoolchildren, from his German education and training, Boas emphasized the mutability of the human form and minimized race in favor of culture. Ales Hrdlicka, a physician, studied anthropology in France under Leonce Manouvrier before working at the Smithsonian Institution from 1902. Earnest Hooton, a Classics PhD from the University of Wisconsin, entered anthropology as an Oxford Rhodes Scholar under R. R. Marett, there was much intellectual continuity with Germans such as Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz and Erwin Baur. In 1951 Sherwood Washburn, a Hooton alumnus, introduced a new physical anthropology and he changed the focus from racial typology to concentrate upon the study of human evolution, moving away from classification towards evolutionary process. Anthropology expanded to comprehend paleoanthropology and primatology, in contrast to much of medical anthropology, it does not generally take a critical approach to biomedicine and Western medicine. Instead, it seeks to improve medical practice and biomedical science through the integration of cross-cultural or biocultural, behavioral. As an academic discipline, biomedical anthropology is closely related to human biology, currently, the only accredited degree program in biomedical anthropology is at Binghamton University. Other anthropology departments, such as that of the University of Washington, anthropometry, the measurement of the human individual Craniometry Ethology Evolutionary biology Evolutionary psychology Paleontology Physiognomy Primatology Sociobiology Michael A

6.
Cultural anthropology
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Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of the anthropological constant, a variety of methods are involved in cultural anthropological, including participant observation, interviews, and surveys. The term civilization later gave way to definitions given by V. Gordon Childe, with forming an umbrella term. Anthropologists have argued that culture is human nature, and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically, since humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, people living in different places or different circumstances develop different cultures. Anthropologists have also pointed out that through culture people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways, much of anthropological theory has originated in an appreciation of and interest in the tension between the local and the global. Colonialism and its processes increasingly brought European thinkers into direct or indirect contact with primitive others, the umbrella term socio-cultural anthropology draws upon both cultural and social anthropology traditions. Anthropology is with the lives of people within different parts of the world, particularly in relation to the discourse of beliefs, in addressing this question, ethnologists in the 19th century divided into two schools of thought. Other ethnologists argued that different groups had the capability of creating similar beliefs, Morgan, in particular, acknowledged that certain forms of society and culture could not possibly have arisen before others. For example, industrial farming could not have been invented before simple farming, Morgan, like other 19th century social evolutionists, believed there was a more or less orderly progression from the primitive to the civilized. Some 20th-century ethnologists, like Julian Steward, have argued that such similarities reflected similar adaptations to similar environments. But these ethnographers also pointed out the superficiality of such similarities. They noted that even traits that spread through diffusion often were given different meanings, others, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, have argued that apparently similar patterns of development reflect fundamental similarities in the structure of human thought. Cultural relativism is a principle that was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas, Boas first articulated the idea in 1887. civilization is not something absolute, but. is relative, and. Our ideas and conceptions are only so far as our civilization goes. Although, Boas did not coin the term, it became common among anthropologists after Boas death in 1942, to express their synthesis of a number of ideas Boas had developed. Boas believed that the sweep of cultures, to be found in connection with any sub-species, is so vast, Cultural relativism involves specific epistemological and methodological claims. Whether or not these claims require a specific ethical stance is a matter of debate and this principle should not be confused with moral relativism. Cultural relativism was in part a response to Western ethnocentrism, ethnocentrism may take obvious forms, in which one consciously believes that ones peoples arts are the most beautiful, values the most virtuous, and beliefs the most truthful

Cultural anthropology
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Edward Burnett Tylor
Cultural anthropology
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In the unilineal evolution model at left, all cultures progress through set stages, while in the multilineal evolution model at right, distinctive culture histories are emphasized.
Cultural anthropology
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Franz Boas, one of the pioneers of modern anthropology, often called the "Father of American Anthropology"
Cultural anthropology
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Margaret Mead (1901-1978)

7.
Social anthropology
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In the USA, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology. Differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue, Social and cultural anthropologists, and some who integrate the two, are found in most institutes of anthropology. Thus the formal names of institutional units no longer necessarily reflect fully the content of the disciplines these cover, most retain the name under which they were founded. It is differentiated from sociology, both in its methods, and in its commitment to the relevance and illumination provided by micro studies. It extends beyond strictly social phenomena to culture, art, individuality, many social anthropologists use quantitative methods, too, particularly those whose research touches on topics such as local economies, demography, human ecology, cognition, or health and illness. The subject has been enlivened by, and has contributed to, approaches from other disciplines, such as philosophy, the history of science, psychoanalysis, the subject has both ethical and reflexive dimensions. An example of this is the effect, whereby those being studied may alter their behaviour in response to the knowledge that they are being watched and studied. Social anthropology has historical roots in a number of 19th-century disciplines, including ethnology, folklore studies, thus, savages from the colonies were displayed, often nudes, in cages, in what has been called human zoos. Penniman to write a history of the discipline entitled A Hundred Years of Anthropology, at the time, the field was dominated by the comparative method. It was assumed that all societies passed through an evolutionary process from the most primitive to most advanced. Non-European societies were seen as evolutionary living fossils that could be studied in order to understand the European past. Scholars wrote histories of prehistoric migrations which were sometimes valuable but often also fanciful and it was during this time that Europeans first accurately traced Polynesian migrations across the Pacific Ocean for instance - although some of them believed it originated in Egypt. Finally, the concept of race was actively discussed as a way to classify -, Tylor and James George Frazer are generally considered the antecedents to modern social anthropology in Britain. Tylor advocated strongly for unilinealism and a form of uniformity of mankind, Frazer, a Scottish scholar with a broad knowledge of Classics, also concerned himself with religion, myth, and magic. His comparative studies, most influentially in the editions of The Golden Bough, analyzed similarities in religious belief. Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, were interested in fieldwork, nor were they interested in examining how the cultural elements. The Golden Bough was abridged drastically in subsequent editions after his first, the findings of the expedition set new standards for ethnographic description. As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resident on a British colonial possession, theoretically, he advocated a functionalist interpretation, which examined how social institutions functioned to satisfy individual needs

Social anthropology
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The British Museum, London
Social anthropology
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E.B. Tylor, 19th-century British anthropologist
Social anthropology
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Bronislaw Malinowski, Anthropologist at the London School of Economics
Social anthropology
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The main LSE entrance

8.
Aerial archaeology
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Aerial archaeology is the study of archaeological remains by examining them from altitude. Early investigators attempted to gain birdseye views of sites using hot air balloons, photographs may be taken either vertically, that is from directly overhead, or obliquely, meaning that they are taken at an angle. In order to provide an effect, an overlapping pair of vertical photographs, taken from slightly offset positions. The advantages of aerial photographs to archaeologists are manifold, large sites could for the first time be viewed accurately, in their entirety and within their landscape. This aided the production of plans and also inspired archaeologists to look beyond the discrete monument. Photos are taken vertically for the purposes of planning and spatial analysis, through the process of photogrammetry, vertical photos can be converted into scaled plans. Archaeological features may also be visible from the air than on the ground. In temperate Europe, aerial reconnaissance is one of the most important ways in which new archaeological sites are discovered and these are referred to as shadow marks. Frost can also appear in winter on ploughed fields where water has naturally accumulated along the lines of buried features, in cases like the Nazca lines, the features are meaningless from the ground but easily visible from the air. Aerial archaeology is used in the processes of research and investigation in aviation archaeology, archaeological field survey Cropmark Shadow marks Xenoarchaeology Bibliography Bourgeois, J. and Meganck, M. Aerial Photography and Archaeology 2003. ISBN 90-382-0782-4 Brophy, K. and Cowley, D, from the air, understanding aerial archaeology. ISBN 0-7524-3130-7 Riley, D. N. Air photography and archaeology, ISBN 0-8122-8087-3 Wilson, D. R. Air photo interpretation for archaeologists, London, The History Press Ltd. ISBN 0-7524-1498-4 Aerial Archaeology Research Group Emporia State University, Aerial Archaeology Aerial and Remote Sensing Archaeology Link, aerialArchaeology. com focuses heavily on near-earth imaging technologies such as kite aerial photography, remote-control powered parachutes, balloons, and model airplanes and helicopters. *** Off-line April 20,2010 *** ACE Foundation Kite Aerial Photographers - Archaeology Sir Henry Wellcome Aerial Archaeology in Northern France

Aerial archaeology
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Aerial view of an amphitheatre in Budapest, Hungary.
Aerial archaeology
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Aerial archeological photograph of the "Nazca monkey" in Peru.
Aerial archaeology
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Low-level, near infra-red kite aerial photo of the site of Ogilface Castle, West Lothian. This image shows features not visible to the naked eye, including tyre tracks on this short, grazed grass.

9.
Aviation archaeology
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Aviation archaeology is a recognized sub-discipline within archaeology and underwater archaeology as a whole. It is an activity practiced by enthusiasts and academics in pursuit of finding, documenting, recovering, and preserving sites important in aviation history. For the most part, these sites are aircraft wrecks and crash sites, the activity dates to post-World War II Europe when, after the conflict, numerous aircraft wrecks studded the countryside. Many times, memorials to those involved in the crashes were put together by individuals, families, landholders, the United Kingdom, whose land was littered with enemy aircraft, introduced a scrap metal initiative for the public which encouraged its disposal. Members of the public who found aircraft sites, especially farmers who could dig them up, beginning in the 1970s, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, looting of aviation wreck sites began to disturb the general public. As the activity grew, laws and regulations were created in areas to counter problems created, such as trespassing. Crash sites vary in size and content, some may have fuselages, engines, Remains of military aircraft crash sites may also be removed by various aircraft restoration groups, particularly if the aircraft was found largely intact. In general, most recent-day aircraft crashes are removed entirely, due to environmental regulations, for example, military crashes in Arizona originate from numerous air bases, past and present. Because of the warm and sunny weather, much of the U. S. Army Air Forces flight training was located in the state, numerous air bases dotted the states - creating conditions for numerous training accidents. Old abandoned US Army Air Corp auxiliary fields and those converted to city municipal airports provide archaeological sites to be researched and investigated. The internet is a media for sharing, recording, educating. For identifying aircraft type and manufacturer by part numbers and manufacturing inspection stamps can be analysed, from detailed GPS data & maps, to researching accident reports information, numerous resources help create a complete picture of the historic event. Accident reports, such as the official US Air Force Accident Report Form 14 becomes the foundation of archaeology research, from there, newspaper articles, county clerk records, sheriff & coroner reports, and library records all aid an aviation archaeologist in their research. Legal protection of aircraft wreck sites is highly variable, in terms of protection by aircraft ownership, the U. S. Navy retains indefinite ownership of all Naval aircraft, including terrestrial or submerged wreck sites. The U. S. Air Force has no policies regarding disturbance of vintage aircraft wreck sites, Sites on federal land are further protected under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 throughout a determination process. The act stipulates that all historic sites must undergo a Section 106 review to determine eligibility for the National Register of Historical Places prior to being disturbed. Federal lands include, among others, National Parks, National Forests, National Marine Sanctuaries, in most cases, the State Historic Preservation Officer will determine whether or not an aviation site is eligible for the register. The National Register deems aviation wreck sites as “any aircraft that has crashed, ditched, damaged, stranded

10.
Biblical archaeology
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For the movement associated with William F. Albright and also known as biblical archaeology, see Biblical archaeology school. The principal location of interest is what is known in the relevant religions as the Holy Land, the scientific techniques used are the same as those used in general archaeology, such as excavation and radiocarbon dating. Biblical archaeology is polemical as there are a number of points of view regarding the nature of its purpose, a number of points of view from important archaeologists are included in the section on Expert Commentaries. In order to understand the significance of biblical archaeology it is first necessary to understand two basic concepts, archaeology as a framework and the Bible as an object for research. Archaeology is a science, not in the Aristotelian sense of cognitio certa per causas and it might be thought that archaeology would have to disregard the information contained within religions and many philosophical systems. This contemporary perception of the myth, mainly developed by Bultmann, has encouraged scientists such as archaeologists to examine the areas indicated by the biblical tales. Other authors prefer to talk about the archaeology of Palestine and to define the relevant territories as those to the east and west of the River Jordan and this indicates that biblical archaeology or that of Palestine is circumscribed by the territories that were the backdrop to the biblical stories. The raison d’etre of biblical archaeology derives from the fact that it allows an understanding of the peoples that inhabited the Holy Land and it allows an understanding of their history, culture, identity and movements. This makes it possible to know the location of the stories. Albright, G. Ernest Wright and Yigael Yadin, using this approach, introduced by P. Biblical archaeology lends fundamental support to exegetical studies, the geographical area that circumscribes the area of interest for biblical archaeology is obviously the biblical lands, also known as the Holy Land. Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece and Rome have greater connections with the stories from the New Testament, in the same way that the spatial criteria vary according to the various points of view of the different researchers, there are also a variety of dates that are of interest. This time period is considered by authorities to be too wide. The term Apostolic Church is taken to mean the period when Jesuss apostles were alive. This period ends with the death of John the Evangelist, the date of his death is not known. However, some consider that the authors of the Fourth Gospel. 8500–4300 BC Pre-Pottery Neolithic = c, 8500–6000 BC Pre-Pottery Neolithic A = c. The most important historical sources include Josephus, Origen, Eusebius, Egeria or Aetheria, was a Spanish woman who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land between 381 and 384

Biblical archaeology
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Mosaic from a Byzantine Church dating from the 5th century. Mosaics are one of the main elements studied by biblical archaeology.
Biblical archaeology
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The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, holds valuable resources for both scientific and biblical research and exploration.
Biblical archaeology
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The territory known as the Middle East was without doubt the location of the events that inspired the writing of the biblical texts.

11.
Forensic anthropology
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Forensic anthropology is the application of the anatomical science of anthropology and its various subfields, including forensic archaeology and forensic taphonomy, in a legal setting. A forensic anthropologist can assist in the identification of deceased individuals whose remains are decomposed, burned, mutilated or otherwise unrecognizable, Forensic anthropologists are also instrumental to the investigation and documentation of genocide and mass graves. Along with forensic pathologists, forensic dentists, and homicide investigators, using physical markers present on a skeleton, a forensic anthropologist can potentially determine a victims age, sex, stature, and ancestry. The methods used to identity a person from a skeleton relies on the past contributions of various anthropologists, through the collection of thousands of specimens and the analysis of differences within a population, estimations can be made based on physical characteristics. Through these, a set of remains can potentially be identified, today, forensic anthropology is a well established discipline within the forensic field. Anthropologists are called upon to investigate remains and to identify individuals from bones when other physical characteristics which could be used to identify a body no longer exist. Forensic anthropologists work in conjunction with forensic pathologists to identify remains based on their skeletal characteristics, in addition to these duties, forensic anthropologists often assist in the investigation of war crimes and mass fatality investigations. Anthropologists have also helped victims of genocide in countries around the world. War crimes anthropologists have helped investigate include the Rwandan Genocide and the Srebrenica Genocide, the use of anthropology in the forensic investigation of remains grew out of the recognition of anthropology as a distinct scientific discipline and the growth of physical anthropology. The field of anthropology began in the United States and struggled to obtain recognition as a legitimate science during the years of the twentieth century. Earnest Hooton pioneered the field of anthropology and became the first physical anthropologist to hold a full-time teaching position in the United States. He was a committee member of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists along with its founder Aleš Hrdlička. Hootons students created some of the first doctoral programs in physical anthropology during the early 20th century, in addition to physical anthropology, Hooton was a proponent of criminal anthropology. Now considered a pseudoscience, criminal anthropologists believed that phrenology and physiognomy could link a persons behavior to specific physical characteristics, the use of criminal anthropology to try to explain certain criminal behaviors arose out of the eugenics movement, popular at the time. The study of information helped shape anthropologists understanding of the human skeleton. Another prominent early anthropologist, Thomas Wingate Todd, was responsible for the creation of the first large collection of human skeletons in 1912. In total, Todd acquired 3,300 human skulls and skeletons,600 anthropoid skulls and skeletons, todds contributions to the field of anthropology remain in use in the modern era and include various studies regarding suture closures on the skull and timing of teeth eruption in the mandible. Todd also developed age estimates based on characteristics of the pubic symphysis

Forensic anthropology
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Forensic science
Forensic anthropology
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Exhumed bodies of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide in a mass grave found in 2007.
Forensic anthropology
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The examination of remains can help build a peri and post-mortem profile of the individual.

12.
Maritime archaeology
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A specialty within maritime archaeology is nautical archaeology, which studies vessel construction and use. As with archaeology as a whole, maritime archaeology can be practised within the historical, industrial, an associated discipline, and again one that lies within archaeology itself, is underwater archaeology, which studies the past through any submerged remains be they of maritime interest or not. An example from the era would be the remains of submerged settlements or deposits now lying under water despite having been dry land when sea levels were lower. The study of submerged aircraft lost in lakes, rivers or in the sea is an example from the historical, industrial or modern era, many specialist sub-disciplines within the broader maritime and underwater archaeological categories have emerged in recent years. This fact has led to shipwrecks often being described in the media, archaeological material in the sea or in other underwater environments is typically subject to different factors than artifacts on land. However, as with terrestrial archaeology what survives to be investigated by modern archaeologists can often be a fraction of the material originally deposited. There are those in the community who see maritime archaeology as a separate discipline with its own concerns. Others value an integrated approach, stressing that nautical activity has economic and social links to communities on land, all that is required is the mastering of skills specific to the environment in which the work occurs. Before the industrial era, travel by water was often easier than over land, as a result, marine channels, navigable rivers and sea crossings formed the trade routes of historic and ancient civilisations. For example, the Mediterranean Sea was known to the Romans as the sea because the Roman empire spread around its coasts. The historic record as well as the remains of harbours, ships and cargoes, later, nations with a strong maritime culture such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal and Spain were able to establish colonies on other continents. Wars were fought at sea over the control of important resources, of late maritime archaeologists have been examining the submerged cultural remains of China, India, Korea and other Asian nations. Saltwater is particularly inimical to iron artefacts including metal shipwrecks, an example of such a collection is the Mary Rose. Where it remains even after the passage of time, the iron or steel hull is often fragile with no remaining metal within the layer of concretion and corrosion products. Even in deep water, commercial activities such as pipe-laying operations, such a wreck is the Mardi Gras shipwreck sunk in the Gulf of Mexico in 4,000 feet of water. The shipwreck lay forgotten at the bottom of the sea until it was discovered in 2002 by an inspection crew working for the Okeanos Gas Gathering Company. Large pipelines can crush sites and render some of their remnants inaccessible as pipe is dropped from the surface to the substrate thousands of feet below. Trawl nets snag and tear superstructures and separate artifacts from their context, the wrecks, and other archaeological sites that have been preserved have generally survived because the dynamic nature of the sea bed can result in artifacts becoming rapidly buried in sediments

Maritime archaeology
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A maritime archaeologist with the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program in St. Augustine, Florida, recording the ship's bell discovered on the 18th century "Storm Wreck."
Maritime archaeology
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Submerged bridge under Lake Murray, South Carolina in 160 ft (49 m) of fresh water seen on side-scan sonar imagery using a Humminbird 981c Side Imaging system
Maritime archaeology
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The final phases of the salvage of the Mary Rose on October 11, 1982.
Maritime archaeology
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The bow of Vasa, a Swedish warship that foundered and sank on its maiden voyage in 1628. It was salvaged in 1961 and is now on permanent display at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm.

13.
Paleoethnobotany
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Paleoethnobotany or Archaeobotany, is the study of remains of plants cultivated or used by man in ancient times, which have survived in archaeological contexts. Paleoethnobotany is the archaeological sub-field that studies plant remains from archaeological sites, Plant macrofossils are preserved through four main modes of preservation at archaeological sites. First, plant remains, usually cereal grains, chaff, seeds and these are referred to as charred or carbonised plant remains. This mode of preservation is biased towards plant remains that come into contact with fire, through cooking or fuel use, Second, plant remains deposited in permanently waterlogged anoxic conditions are preserved as the absence of oxygen prohibits microbial activity. This mode of preservation occurs in deep archaeological features such as wells, in settlements where organic refuse is rapidly deposited. A wide range of plant remains are preserved, including seeds, fruit stones, nutshells, leaves, straw. Third, calcium-phosphate mineralisation of plant remains occurs usually in latrine pits and in middens, in latrine pits, plant remains which have been consumed by humans are the most common items, such as seeds of flavourings, fruit pips and fruit stones. Finally, plant remains are preserved by desiccation in arid environments, delicate vegetative plant remains are preserved, such as onion skin and artichoke bracts, alongside fruit stones, cereal chaff and seeds of wild plants. Paleoethnobotanists use a variety of methods to recover and identify plant remains, charred plant remains are usually recovered by flotation. The matrix is slowly added to agitated water, the soil, sand, and other heavy material, known as heavy fraction, will sink to the bottom. The less dense material such as charred seeds, grains. The material that floats to the top, called light fraction, is poured into a sieve, the light fraction is then dried and later examined under a low power microscope. Samples of the fraction are also gathered for later analysis. Flotation can be undertaken manually with buckets, or by machine-assisted flotation where water is circulated through a series of tanks by a pump, waterlogged plant remains are separated from the matrix by a combination of wet-sieving and/or small-scale flotation in a laboratory. Desiccated plant remains are recovered by dry-sieving, using a stack of different sieves to separate larger items such as cereal straw. Identification literature as well as a collection of modern plant materials are crucial for reliable results. Depending on the type of material, and its condition, also other methods such as sections or SEM are applied. Paleoethnobotanists also recover and analyze microremains, human and animal excrements, or plant impressions in ceramic sherds, palynology is a mature and distinct scientific discipline that studies pollen, typically in the context of reconstructing past environments

14.
Zooarchaeology
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Zooarchaeology is the study of faunal remains. Faunal remains are the left behind when an animal dies. It includes, bones, shells, hair, chitin, scales, hides, proteins, of these items, bones and shells are the ones that occur most frequently at archaeological sites where faunal remains can be found. Much of the time, most of the remains do not survive. They often decompose or break because of various circumstances and this can cause difficulties in identifying the remains and interpreting their significance. The development of zooarchaeology in Eastern North America can be broken up into three different periods, the first being the Formative period starting around the 1860s, the second being the Systematization period beginning in the early 1950s, and the Integration period which began about 1969. Full-time zooarchaeologists didn’t come about until the Systematization period, before that it was just a technique that was applied but not specifically studied. Zooarchaeological specialists started to come about partly because of a new approach to archaeology known as “processual archaeology. ”This approach puts more emphasis on explaining why things happened, archaeologists began to specialize in zooarchaeology, and their numbers increased from there on. Zooarchaeology is primarily used to answer several questions and these include, What was the diet like, and in what ways were the animals used for food. Which were the animals that were eaten, in what amounts, who were the ones to obtain the food, and did the availability of that food depend on age or gender. How was culture, such as technologies and behavior, influenced by, what purposes, other than food, were animals used for. Zooarchaeology can also tell us what the environment might have been like in order for the different animals to have survived, in addition to helping us understand the past, zooarchaeology can also help us to improve the present and the future. Studying how people dealt with animals, and its effects can help us avoid many potential ecological problems and this specifically includes problems involving wildlife management. For example, one of the questions that wildlife preservationists ask is whether they should keep animals facing extinction in several smaller areas, based on zooarchaeological evidence, they found that animals that are split up into several smaller areas are more likely to go extinct. One of the techniques that use is close attention to taphonomy. This includes studying how items are buried and deposited at the site in question, what the conditions are that aid in the preservation of these items, another technique that zooarchaeologists use is lab analysis. This analysis can include comparing the skeletons found on site with already identified animal skeletons and this not only helps to identify what the animal is, but also whether the animal was domesticated or not. Yet another technique that zooarchaeologists use is quantification and they make interpretations based on the number and size of the bones

Zooarchaeology
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Egyptian mummy of a dog front and profile views
Zooarchaeology
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A reference collection of shinbones (Tibia) of different animal species helps determining old bones. Dutch Heritage Agency.

15.
Anthrozoology
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Anthrozoology is the subset of ethnobiology that deals with interactions between humans and other animals. It is a field that overlaps with other disciplines including anthropology, ethnology, medicine, psychology, veterinary medicine. A major focus of research is the quantifying of the positive effects of human-animal relationships on either party. It includes scholars from fields such as anthropology, sociology, biology, history, the interaction and enhancement within captive animal interactions. In the UK, the University of Exeter runs an MA in Anthrozoology which explores human-animal interactions from anthropological perspectives, there are now three primary lists for HAS scholars and students—H-Animal, the Human-Animal Studies listserv, and NILAS, as well as the Critical Animal Studies list. There are now over a dozen journals covering HAS issues, many of them founded in the last decade, and hundreds of HAS books, most of them published in the last decade. Brill, Berg, Johns Hopkins, Purdue, Columbia, Reaktion, Palgrave-McMillan, University of Minnesota, University of Illinois, beginning in 2011, ASI has partnered with Wesleyan Animal Studies, who will be hosting the fellowship in conjunction with ASI. There are also a handful of HAS conferences per year, including organized by ISAZ and NILAS. Finally, there are more HAS courses being taught now than ever before, the ASI website lists over 300 courses in twenty-nine disciplines at over 200 colleges and universities, not including over 100 law school courses. Animals and Society Institute Anthrozoology Research Group H-Animal Human-Animal Studies listserve Humanimalia, a journal of human-animal interface studies NILAS

16.
Evolutionary anthropology
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Evolutionary anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of the evolution of human physiology and human behaviour and the relation between hominids and non-hominid primates. Evolutionary anthropology is based in science and social science. Various fields and disciplines of evolutionary anthropology are, Human evolution, primatology and primate ethology and paleontology. The sociocultural evolution of human behavior, the evolutionary psychology and evolutionary linguistics of humans. The archaeological study of technology and change over time and space. Human evolutionary genetics and changes in the genome over time. The cognitive neuroscience and neuroanthropology of human and primate cognition, culture and actions, Human behavioural ecology and the interaction of humans and the environment. Studies of human anatomy, endocrinology, and neurobiology and differences and changes between species, variation between groups, and relationships to cultural factors. Evolutionary anthropology is concerned with biological and cultural evolution of humans, past and present. It is based on an approach, and brings together fields such as archaeology, behavioral ecology, psychology, primatology. It is a dynamic and interdisciplinary field, drawing on many lines of evidence to understand the experience, past. Studies of biological evolution generally concern the evolution of the human form, cultural evolution involves the study of cultural change over time and space and frequently incorporate cultural transmission models. The study of change is increasingly performed through cladistics and genetic models. Biocultural evolution Evolutionary psychology Evolutionary neuroscience Noogenesis Sociobiology Dual inheritance theory Homininae

17.
Molecular anthropology
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Generally, comparisons are made between sequence, either DNA or protein sequence, however early studies used comparative serology. By examining DNA sequences in different populations, scientists can determine the closeness of relationships between populations, Molecular anthropology has been extremely useful in establishing the evolutionary tree of humans and other primates, including closely related species like chimps and gorillas. However, more recent studies have modified the commonality of 98 percent to a commonality of 94 percent, such information is useful in searching for common ancestors and coming to a better understanding of how humans evolved. There are two continuous linkage groups in humans that are carried by a single sex, the first is the Y chromosome, which is passed from father to son. Anatomical females carry a Y chromosome only rarely, as a result of genetic defect, the other linkage group is the mitochondrial DNA. MtDNA can only be passed to the generation by females. The non-recombinant portion of the Y chromosome and the mtDNA, under normal circumstances, part of the Y chromosome can undergo recombination with the X chromosome and within ape history the boundary has changed. Such recombinant changes in the non-recombinant region of Y are extremely rare, Mitochondrial DNA became an area of research in phylogenetics in the late 1970s. Unlike genomic DNA, it offered advantages in that it did not undergo recombination, the process of recombination, if frequent enough, corrupts the ability to create parsimonious trees because stretches of amino acid subsititions. When looking between distantly related species, recombination is less of a problem since recombination between branches from common ancestors is prevented after true speciation occurs, when examining closely related species, or branching within species, recombination creates a large number of irrelevant SNPs for cladistic analysis. MtDNA, through the process of division, become clonal over time, very little, too often none. While recombination may occur in mtDNA, there is risk that it will be passed to the next generation. As a result, mtDNA become clonal copies of each other, as a result, mtDNA does not have pitfalls of autosomal loci when studied in interbreeding groups. Another advantage of mtDNA is that the hyper-variable regions evolve very quickly and this allowed the use of mitochondrial DNA to determine that the relative age of the human population was small, having gone through a recent constriction at about 150,000 years ago. Mitochondrial DNA has also used to verify the proximity of chimpanzees to humans relative to gorillas. More recently, the genome has been used to estimate branching patterns in peoples around the world, such as when the new world was settled. The problem with these studies have been that they rely heavily on mutations in the coding region, many of the mtDNA have far more mutations and at rarely mutated coding sites relative to expectations of neutral mutations. Mitochondrial DNA offers another advantage over autosomal DNA, there are generally 2 to 4 copies of each chromosome in each cell

Molecular anthropology
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Image of mitochondrion. There are many mitochondria within a cell, and DNA in them replicates independently of the chromosomes in the nucleus.

19.
Palaeoanthropology
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Hominoids are a primate superfamily, the hominid family is currently considered to comprise both the great ape lineages and human lineages within the hominoid superfamily. The Homininae comprise both the human lineages and the African ape lineages, the term African apes refers only to chimpanzees and gorillas. The terminology of the biological family is currently in flux. The term hominin refers to any genus in the human tribe, since, the great apes were considered the closest relatives of human beings, based on morphological similarity. The science arguably began in the late 19th century when important discoveries occurred that led to the study of human evolution. The discovery of the Neanderthal in Germany, Thomas Huxleys Evidence as to Mans Place in Nature, the modern field of paleoanthropology began in the 19th century with the discovery of Neanderthal man, and with evidence of so-called cave men. Debates between Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen focused on the idea of human evolution, Huxley convincingly illustrated many of the similarities and differences between humans and apes in his 1863 book Evidence as to Mans Place in Nature. By the time Darwin published his own book on the subject, Descent of Man, even many of Darwins original supporters balked at the idea that human beings could have evolved their apparently boundless mental capacities and moral sensibilities through natural selection. Prior to todays general acceptance of Africa as the root of genus Homo, although Schlosser was very cautious, identifying the tooth only as “. Anthropoide g. et sp. indet. ”He was hopeful that future work would discover a new anthropoid in China. Eleven years later, the Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson was sent to China as a mining advisor and it was he who, in 1918, discovered the sites around Zhoukoudian, a village about 50 kilometers southwest of Beijing. However, because of the nature of the initial finds. Work did not resume until 1921, when the Austrian paleontologist, Otto Zdansky, fresh with his degree from Vienna. Zdansky conducted short-term excavations at Locality 1 in 1921 and 1923, with that done, Zdansky returned to Austria and suspended all fieldwork. News of the fossil hominin teeth delighted the scientific community in Beijing, at the epicenter of excitement was Davidson Black, a Canadian-born anatomist working at Peking Union Medical College. Black shared Andersson’s interest, as well as his view that central Asia was a home for early humankind. The Zhoukoudian Project came into existence in the spring of 1927, being the first institution of its kind, the Cenozoic Laboratory opened up new avenues for the study of paleogeology and paleontology in China. The Laboratory was the precursor of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Science, the first of the major project finds are attributed to the young Swedish paleontologist, Anders Birger Bohlin, then serving as the field advisor at Zhoukoudian. He recovered a left lower molar that Black identified as unmistakably human, the news was at first met with skepticism, and many scholars had reservations that a single tooth was sufficient to justify the naming of a new type of early hominin

20.
Primatology
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Primatology is the scientific study of primates. There are two centers of primatology, Western primatology and Japanese primatology. These two divergent disciplines stem from their cultural backgrounds and philosophies that went into their founding. Although, fundamentally, both Western and Japanese primatology share many of the principles, the areas of their focus in primate research. Western primatology stems primarily from research by North American and European scientists, the study of primatology looks at the biological and psychological aspects of non-human primates. The focus is on studying the links between humans and primates. It is believed that by understanding our closest animal relatives, we might understand the nature shared with our ancestors. The general belief is that the observation of nature must be either extremely limited. Either way, the observers must be neutral to their subjects and this allows for data to be unbiased and for the subjects to be uninfluenced by human interference. Field is done in natural environments, in which scientific observers watch primates in their natural habitat, laboratory study is done in controlled lab settings. In lab settings, scientists are able to perform controlled experimentation on the learning capabilities, in semi-free ranging studies, scientists are able to watch how primates might act in the wild but have easier access to them, and the ability to control their environments. Such facilities include the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Georgia, all types of primate study in the Western methodology are meant to be neutral. Although there are certain Western primatologists who do more subjective research, early field primatology tended to focus on individual researchers. Researchers such as Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall are examples of this, long-term sites of research tend to be best associated with their founders, and this led to some tension between younger primatologists and the veterans in the field. The discipline of Japanese primatology was developed out of animal ecology and it is mainly credited to Kinji Imanishi and Junichiro Itani. Imanishi was an animal ecologist who began studying wild horses before focusing more on primate ecology and he helped found the Primate Research Group in 1950. Junichiro was a renowned anthropologist and a professor at Kyoto University and he is a co-founder of the Primate Research Institute and the Centre for African Area Studies. The Japanese discipline of primatology tends to be interested in the social aspects of primates

21.
Anthropology of development
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The anthropology of development is a term applied to a body of anthropological work which views development from a critical perspective. The kind of issues addressed, and implications for the approach typically adopted can be gleaned from a list questions posed by Gow and these questions involve anthropologists asking why, if a key development goal is to alleviate poverty, is poverty increasing. Why is there such a gap between plans and outcomes, why are those working in development so willing to disregard history and the lessons it might offer. Why is development so externally driven rather than having an internal basis, in short why does so much planned development fail. This anthropology of development has been distinguished from development anthropology, Development anthropology refers to the application of anthropological perspectives to the multidisciplinary branch of development studies. It takes international development and international aid as primary objects, while some theorists distinguish between the anthropology of development and development anthropology, this distinction is increasingly thought of as obsolete. The problem therefore is not that of driving out culture. The British government established the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in 1937 to conduct science research in British Central Africa. It was part of the establishment, although its head. The term subculture of poverty made its first prominent appearance in the ethnography Five Families, Lewis struggled to render the poor as legitimate subjects whose lives were transformed by poverty. Rostows unilineal evolutionist model hypothesized all societies would progress through the stages to a modernity defined by the West. George Dalton applied the substantivist economic ideas of Karl Polanyi to economic anthropology and he therefore critiqued the formalist economic modelling of Rostow. He was the author of Growth without development, An economic survey of Liberia and Economic Anthropology and Development, Essays on Tribal, Dependency theory arose as a theory in Latin America in reaction to modernization theory. It argues that resources flow from a periphery of poor and underdeveloped states to a core of wealthy states, immanuel Wallersteins world-systems theory was the version of Dependency theory that most North American anthropologists engaged with. His theories are similar to Dependency theory, although he placed emphasis on the system as system. Wallerstein also provided an account of the development of capitalism which had been missing from Dependency theory. Women in development is an approach to development projects that emerged in the 1970s, later, the Gender and development approach proposed more emphasis on gender relations rather than seeing womens issues in isolation. The WID school grew out of the work of Esther Boserup

Anthropology of development
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Location of Lesotho in South Africa

22.
Ecological anthropology
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Ecological anthropology is a sub-field of anthropology and is defined as the “study of cultural adaptations to environments”. The sub-field is also defined as, the study of relationships between a population of humans and their biophysical environment. ”Ecological anthropology developed from the approach of cultural ecology, research pursued under this approach aims to study a wide range of human responses to environmental problems. In the 1960s, ecological anthropology first appeared as a response to cultural ecology, Steward focused on studying different modes of subsistence as methods of energy transfer and then analyzed how they determine other aspects of culture. Culture became the unit of analysis and it was characterised by systems theory, functionalism and negative feedback analysis. Benjamin S. Orlove has noted that the development of ecological anthropology has occurred in stages, “Each stage is a reaction to the previous one rather than merely an addition to it”. During the first stage, two different models were developed by both White and Steward, during the second stage, it was noted that the later group agreed with Steward and White, while the other disagreed. ‘Neoevolutionists’ borrowed from the work of Charles Darwin, the general approach suggested that “evolution is progressive and leads towards new and better forms in succeeding periods”. ‘Processual ecological anthropology’ is noted to be new, studies based on this approach “seek to overcome the split in the second stage of ecological anthropology between excessively short and long time scales”. The approach more specifically, examines “shifts and changes in individual and group activities, one of the leading practitioners within this sub-field of anthropology was Roy Rappaport. He conducted the majority, if not all, of his fieldwork amongst a group known as the Maring, patricia K. Townsends work highlights the difference between ecological anthropology and environmental anthropology. In her view, some anthropologists use both terms in an interchangeable fashion and she states that, “Ecological anthropology will refer to one particular type of research in environmental anthropology – field studies that describe a single ecosystem including a human population”. Studies conducted under this sub-field “frequently deal with a population of only a few hundred people such as a village or neighbourhood”. Studies under the discipline are concerned with the ethnoecologies of indigenous populations, “In the face of national and international incentives to exploit and degrade, ethnological systems that once preserved local and regional environments increasingly are ineffective or irrelevant”. Threats also exist of “commercial logging, industrial pollution, and the imposition of external management systems” on their local ecosystems and these threats to indigenous ways of life are a familiar occurrence in the field of anthropology. Conrad Phillip Kottak states that, “Today’s ecological anthropology, aka environmental anthropology, attempts not only to understand, one of the current criticisms is that, in its original form, ecological anthropology relies upon cultural relativism as the norm. However, in world, there are few cultures that are isolated enough to live in a true culturally relative state. Instead, cultures are being influenced and changed by media, governments, NGOs, businesses, in response, the discipline has seen a shift towards applied ecological anthropology, political ecology and environmental anthropology. ISBN 0-470-85000-0 McGrath, Stacy Ecological Anthropology, M. D Murphy Anthropological Theories

23.
Environmental anthropology
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Environmental anthropology is a sub-specialty within the field of anthropology that takes an active role in examining the relationships between humans and their environment across space and time. The sixties was a decade for environmental anthropology, with functionalism. The rudiments of the theories can be seen in Marcel Mauss Seasonal Variation of Eskimo. Although later, system theories were later criticized for narrowly assuming the state of societies as static. The main focus of theories in the sixties, as conveyed by Julian Steward, was acknowledgment of recurrence. Stewards ecological anthropology was based on topography, climate, and resources, while Marvin Harris cultural materialism observed and gauged social units by means of material production. Both focused on culture as a contingent to the environment. Importantly, those limitations are not considered determinants, the new focus of environmental anthropology was cultural variation and diversity. Roy A. Rappaport and Hawkes, Hill, and OConnells use of Pykes optimal foraging theory for the work are some examples of this new focus. The contemporary perspective of environmental anthropology, and arguably at least the backdrop, if not the focus of most of the ethnographies, many characterize this new perspective as more informed with culture, politics and power, globalization, localized issues, and more. The focus and data interpretation is used for arguments for/against or creation of policy. Often, the observer has become an part of the struggle either directly or indirectly. Such is the case with environmental justice advocate Melissa Checker and her relationship with the people of Hyde Park, critiques on this modern perspective and non-governmental organizations influences and effects on social groups is usually that they generalize and obscure local discourse and message. Often resulting in environmentalism by bureaucrats, PR firms, governments, an example of negative effects can be ascertained in the Malaysian Rainforest, in which NGOs and other outsider activist deflected the issue, ignoring the locality of the problem. Environmental anthropology enters the field as an applied dimension built on the primary approaches within contemporary ecological anthropology and it focuses on how culture promotes connections between humans and their occupied ecosystems. American anthropologist Julian Steward, is the originator of cultural ecology. A troubled childhood led to Stewards fascination of the natural world, in 1918 Steward attended a California College, found inspiration from the natural environment and gained insight which promoted a future passion toward ecological studies. Steward contributions to theories of cultural ecology and cultural evolution are renowned, Steward officially formulated the basic theoretical and methodological framework for cultural ecology in the 1950s–60s

24.
Economic anthropology
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Economic anthropology is a field that attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a relationship with the discipline of economics. For the most part, studies in economic anthropology focus on exchange, in contrast, the Marxian school known as political economy focuses on production. Post-World War II, economic anthropology was influenced by the work of economic historian Karl Polanyi. Polanyi drew on anthropological studies to argue that true market exchange was limited to a number of western. Applying formal economic theory to non-industrial societies was mistaken, he argued, in non-industrial societies, exchange was embedded in such non-market institutions as kinship, religion, and politics. The Formalist vs Substantivist debate was highly influential and defined an era, neo-substantivists examine the ways in which so-called pure market exchange in market societies fails to fit market ideology. Economic anthropologists have abandoned the primitivist niche they were relegated to by economists and they now study the operations of corporations, banks, and the global financial system from an anthropological perspective. Malinowski carefully traced the network of exchanges of bracelets and necklaces across the Trobriand Islands and he stated that this exchange system was clearly linked to political authority. In the 1920s and later, Malinowskis study became the subject of debate with the French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, malinowski emphasised the exchange of goods between individuals, and their non-altruistic motives for giving, they expected a return of equal or greater value. In other words, reciprocity is an part of gifting. Mauss, in contrast, has emphasized that the gifts were not between individuals, but between representatives of larger collectivities and these gifts were, he argued, a total prestation. Given the stakes, Mauss asked why anyone would give them away and his answer was an enigmatic concept, hau, the spirit of the gift. A good part of the confusion was due to a bad translation, Mauss appeared to be arguing that a return gift is given to keep the very relationship between givers alive, a failure to return a gift ends the relationship and the promise of any future gifts. Mauss concept of total prestations has been developed in the later 20th century by Annette Weiner, malinowski missed this and ignored womens exchanges in his study. Secondly, Weiner has developed Mauss argument about reciprocity and the spirit of the gift in terms of inalienable possessions, Weiner contrasts moveable goods, which can be exchanged, with immoveable goods, which serve to draw the gifts back. She argues that the specific goods given, such as Crown Jewels, are so identified with groups that, even when given. Not all societies, however, have these kinds of goods, French anthropologist Maurice Godelier pushed the analysis further in The Enigma of the Gift

25.
Political economy in anthropology
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Political Economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture. Political Economy was introduced in American anthropology primarily through the support of Julian Steward, steward’s research interests centered on “subsistence” — the dynamic interaction of man, environment, technology, social structure, and the organization of work. This emphasis on subsistence and production - as opposed to exchange - is what distinguishes the Political Economy approach, stewards most theoretically productive years were from 1946-1953, while teaching at Columbia University. At this time, Columbia saw an influx of World War II veterans who were attending school thanks to the GI Bill, murphy, and influenced other scholars such as Elman Service, Marvin Harris and June Nash. Many of these participated in the Puerto Rico Project, a large-scale group research study that focused on modernization in Puerto Rico. Three main areas of interest rapidly developed, the first of these areas was concerned with the pre-capitalist societies that were subject to evolutionary tribal stereotypes. Sahlins work on hunter-gatherers as the affluent society did much to dissipate that image. The second area was concerned with the vast majority of the population at the time. The third area was on colonialism, imperialism, and the creation of the capitalist world-system, more recently, these political economists have more directly addressed issues of industrial capitalism around the world. Cultural materialism is a research orientation introduced by Marvin Harris in 1968, as a theoretical paradigm, indeed, it is said to be the most enduring achievement of that work. Harris subsequently developed a defense of the paradigm in his 1979 book Cultural Materialism, to Harris, cultural materialism is based on the simple premise that human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence. Harris approach was influenced by but distinct from Marx, Harris method was to demonstrate how particular cultural practices served a materialistic function. Structural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and it was influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and anthropologists outside France during the 1970s. French structuralist Marxism melded Marxist political economy with Levi-Strausss structural methodology, eliminating the human subject, dialectical reason, a mode of production consisting of producers, non-producers and means of production, combined in a variety of ways, formed the deep structure of a social formation. A social formation combined several modes of production, only one of which was dominant or determinant, primary anthropological theorists of this school included Maurice Godelier, Claude Meillassoux, Emmanuel Terray and Pierre-Philippe Rey. Structural Marxism arose in opposition to the humanistic Marxism that dominated many western universities during the 1970s, in contrast to Humanistic Marxism, Althusser stressed that Marxism was a science that examined objective structures. Critical influences on Structural Marxism, primarily from the British Marxist historical tradition, Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Raymond Williams. They criticized the functionalist emphasis in Structural Marxism, that individuals in favour of the structural elements of their model

Political economy in anthropology
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Dobe!Kung men lighting a fire.
Political economy in anthropology
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Cecil Rhodes, driving force of British imperialism in Africa
Political economy in anthropology
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Cambodian rice farming

26.
Kinship
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Anthropologist Robin Fox states that the study of kinship is the study of what man does with these basic facts of life – mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship etc. Human society is unique, he argues, in that we are working with the raw material as exists in the animal world. These social ends include the socialization of children and the formation of economic, political. Kinship can refer both to the patterns of social relationships themselves, or it can refer to the study of the patterns of relationships in one or more human cultures. Further, even within two broad usages of the term, there are different theoretical approaches. Broadly, kinship patterns may be considered to include people related by both descent – i. e. social relations during development – and by marriage. Human kinship relations through marriage are commonly called affinity in contrast to the relationships that arise in ones group of origin, in some cultures, kinship relationships may be considered to extend out to people an individual has economic or political relationships with, or other forms of social connections. Within a culture, some descent groups may be considered to lead back to gods or animal ancestors and this may be conceived of on a more or less literal basis. Kinship can also refer to a principle by which individuals or groups of individuals are organized into groups, roles, categories. Family relations can be represented concretely or abstractly by degrees of relationship, a relationship may be relative or reflect an absolute. Degrees of relationship are not identical to heirship or legal succession, many codes of ethics consider the bond of kinship as creating obligations between the related persons stronger than those between strangers, as in Confucian filial piety. In a more general sense, kinship may refer to a similarity or affinity between entities on the basis of some or all of their characteristics that are under focus. This may be due to a shared origin, a shared historical or cultural connection. For example, a person studying the roots of human languages might ask whether there is kinship between the English word seven and the German word sieben. It can be used in a more diffuse sense as in, for example, in biology, kinship typically refers to the degree of genetic relatedness or coefficient of relationship between individual members of a species. It may also be used in this sense when applied to human relationships. Family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, in most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children. Kin terminologies can be descriptive or classificatory

27.
Ethnomusicology
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Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. Stated broadly, ethnomusicology may be described as an investigation of music in its cultural contexts. When the field first came into existence, it was limited to the study of non-Western music—in contrast to the study of Western art music. Over time, the definition broadened to study of all the musics of the world according to certain approaches. While there is not a single, authoritative definition for ethnomusicology, Musical fieldworkers often also collect recordings and contextual information about the music of interest. Thus, ethnomusicological studies do not rely on printed or manuscript sources as the source of epistemic authority. Oskar Kolberg is regarded as one of the earliest European ethnomusicologists as he first began collecting Polish folk songs in 1839, comparative musicology, the primary precursor to ethnomusicology, emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The International Musical Society in Berlin in 1899 acted as one of the first centers for ethnomusicology, the International Council for Traditional Music and the Society for Ethnomusicology are the primary international academic organizations for advancing the discipline of ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicologists have offered varying definitions of the field, more specifically, scholars debate what constitutes ethnomusicology. Bruno Nettl distinguishes between discipline and field, believing ethnomusicology is the latter, there are multiple approaches to and challenges of the field. Some approaches reference musical areas like musical synthesis in Ghana while others emphasize a study of culture through the avenue of music, the multifaceted and dynamic approaches to ethnomusicology allude to how the field has evolved. The primary element that distinguishes ethnomusicology from musicology is the expectation that ethnomusicologists engage in sustained, there are many individuals and groups who can be connected to ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology has evolved both in terminology and ideology since its inception in the late 19th century. While studying in Berlin at Frederick William University and attending the International Music Society, in his notes, he emphasized cultural and religious elements as well as social aspects of music and poetry. Inspired by these thoughts, many Western European nations began to transcribe and categorize music based on ethnicity, inspired by these thoughts, many Western European nations began to put many ethnic and cultural pieces of music onto paper and separate them. In 1956 the hyphen was removed with ideological intent to signify the discipline’s validity and these changes to the field’s name paralleled its internal shifts in ideological and intellectual emphasis. Kolinski also urged the field to move beyond ethnocentrism even as the term grew in popularity as a replacement for what was once described by comparative musicology. In the 1970s, ethnomusicology was becoming well known outside of the small circle of scholars who had founded and fostered the early development of the field

28.
Sociolinguistics
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Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It is historically related to linguistic anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has even been questioned. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, the study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of his 1939 article Sociolinguistics in India published in Man in India. Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by such as William Labov in the US. For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of attitudes that a particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use in a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, the study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the given to the use of different varieties of language in different social situations. William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics and he is especially noted for introducing the quantitative study of language variation and change, making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline. Also, sociolinguistics can study a gradual transition of individual values of a word in the context its semantics which occur in some ethnic, altyntsev studied the semantics of the word love among the Ashkenazi Jews from Udmurtia and Tatarstan. Sociolinguistic interviews are a part of collecting data for sociolinguistic studies. There is an interviewer, who is conducting the study, and a subject, or informant, who is the interviewee. In order to get a grasp on a linguistic form and how it is used in the dialect of the subject. There are five different styles, ranging from formal to casual, the most formal style would be elicited by having the subject read a list of minimal pairs. Minimal pairs are pairs of words differ in only one phoneme. Having the subject read a word list will elicit a formal register, the reading passage style is next down on the formal register, and the interview style is when an interviewer can finally get into eliciting a more casual speech from the subject. Of course, the most sought after type of speech is the casual style and this type of speech is difficult if not impossible to elicit because of the Observers Paradox. The closest one might come to CS in an interview is when the subject is interrupted by a friend or family member

Sociolinguistics
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Topics and terminology

29.
Anthropometry
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Anthropometry refers to the measurement of the human individual. Anthropometry involves the measurement of the physical properties of the human body, primarily dimensional descriptors of body size. Changes in lifestyles, nutrition, and ethnic composition of lead to changes in the distribution of body dimensions. Due to methodological and practical problems, its measurement is subject to considerable error in statistical sampling. The average height in genetically and environmentally homogeneous populations is often proportional across a number of individuals. Exceptional height variation within such a population is due to gigantism or dwarfism. Similarly, the shortest and tallest of individuals, Chandra Bahadur Dangi and Robert Wadlow, have ranged from 1 ft 9 in to 8 ft 11.1 in, respectively. Adult brain size varies from 974.9 cm3 to 1,498.1 cm3 in females and 1,052.9 cm3 to 1,498.5 cm3 in males, with the average being 1,130 cm3 and 1,260 cm3, respectively. The right cerebral hemisphere is typically larger than the left, whereas the cerebellar hemispheres are typically of similar size. Size of the stomach varies significantly in adults, with one study showing volumes ranging from 520 cm3 to 1,536 cm3. Male and female genitalia exhibit considerable variation, with penis size differing substantially. Human beauty and physical attractiveness have been preoccupations throughout history which often intersect with anthropometric standards, cosmetology, facial symmetry, and waist–hip ratio are three such examples where measurements are commonly thought to be fundamental. Anthropometric studies today are conducted to investigate the significance of differences in body proportion between populations whose ancestors lived in different environments. On a micro evolutionary level anthropologists use anthropometric variation to reconstruct small-scale population history, today anthropometry can be performed with three-dimensional scanners. A global collaborative study to examine the uses of three-dimensional scanners for health care was launched in March 2007, the Body Benchmark Study will investigate the use of three-dimensional scanners to calculate volumes and segmental volumes of an individual body scan. The aim is to establish whether the Body Volume Index has the potential to be used as a long-term computer-based anthropometric measurement for health care, in 2001 the UK conducted the largest sizing survey to date using scanners. Since then several national surveys have followed in the UKs pioneering steps, notably SizeUSA, SizeMexico, and SizeThailand, sizeUK showed that the nation had become taller and heavier but not as much as expected. Since 1951, when the last womens survey had taken place, baropodographic devices fall into two main categories, floor-based, and in-shoe

30.
Ethnology
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Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationship between them. The term ethnologia is credited to Adam Franz Kollár who used and defined it in his Historiae ivrisqve pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates published in Vienna in 1783, the distinction between the three terms is increasingly blurry. Ethnology has been considered a field since the late 18th century especially in Europe and is sometimes conceived of as any comparative study of human groups. The 15th-century exploration of America by European explorers had an important role in formulating new notions of the Occidental, such as and this term was used in conjunction with savages, which was either seen as a brutal barbarian, or alternatively, as noble savage. Thus, civilization was opposed in a dualist manner to barbary, lévi-Strauss often referred to Montaignes essay on cannibalism as an early example of ethnology. Lévi-Strauss aimed, through a method, at discovering universal invariants in human society. However, the claims of such cultural universalism have been criticized by various 19th and 20th century social thinkers, including Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, list of scholars of ethnology Forster, Johann Georg Adam. Voyage round the World in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772,3,4, the Elementary Structures of Kinship, Structural Anthropology Mauss, Marcel. Originally published as Essai sur le don, forme et raison de léchange dans les sociétés archaïques in 1925, this classic text on gift economy appears in the English edition as The Gift, The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Akwe-Shavante society, The Politics of Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States, problemi generali delletnologia europea, La Ricerca Folklorica, No. Webpage History of German Anthropology/Ethnology 1945/49-1990 Languages describes the languages and ethnic groups found worldwide, national Museum of Ethnology - Osaka, Japan Texts on Wikisource, Rhyn, G. A. F. Van

31.
Reflexivity (social theory)
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Reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a relationship in which neither can be assigned as causes or effects. In sociology, reflexivity therefore comes to mean an act of self-reference where examination or action bends back on, refers to, to this extent it commonly refers to the capacity of an agent to recognize forces of socialization and alter their place in the social structure. A low level of reflexivity would result in an individual shaped largely by their environment, a high level of social reflexivity would be defined by an individual shaping their own norms, tastes, politics, desires, and so on. This is similar to the notion of autonomy and this is an instance of a positive feedback loop. Thus for example an anthropologist living in a village may affect the village. The observations are not independent of the participation of the observer, Reflexivity is, therefore, a methodological issue in the social sciences analogous to the observer effect. Reflexivity includes both a process of self-consciousness inquiry and the study of social behavior with reference to theories about social relationships. The principle of reflexivity was perhaps first enunciated by the sociologist William Thomas as the Thomas theorem, the prophecy has a constitutive impact on the outcome or result, changing the outcome from what would otherwise have happened. Reflexivity was taken up as an issue in science in general by Karl Popper, who called it the Oedipal effect, the problem is even more difficult in the social sciences. Giddens accentuated this theme with his notion of reflexive modernity – the argument that, over time, society is becoming increasingly more self-aware, reflective, for Bourdieu, therefore, reflexivity is part of the solution, not the problem. Michel Foucaults The Order of Things can be said to touch on the issue of Reflexivity, foucault examines the history of Western thought since the Renaissance and argues that each historical epoch has an episteme, or a historical a priori, that structures and organizes knowledge. Foucault argues that the concept of man emerged in the early 19th century, what he calls the Age of Man and he regards his insights into market behaviour from applying the principle as a major factor in the success of his financial career. Reflexivity is inconsistent with equilibrium theory, which stipulates that markets move towards equilibrium, in equilibrium theory, prices in the long run at equilibrium reflect the underlying fundamentals, which are unaffected by prices. Because the pattern is self-reinforcing, markets tend towards disequilibrium, Soros has often claimed that his grasp of the principle of reflexivity is what has given him his edge and that it is the major factor contributing to his successes as a trader. The perception that China is the weakest link in the economy dominated the International Monetary Fund annual meeting in Peru in October 2015. Kaletsky claims that suspect but powerful financial feedback perceptions are constantly self-reinforced, according to Soros concept of reflexivity, financial markets can create inaccurate expectations and then change reality to accord with them. This is the opposite of the process described in textbooks and built into economic models, in 2009, Soros funded the launch of the Institute for New Economic Thinking with the hope that it would develop reflexivity further

32.
Culture
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Culture can be defined in numerous ways. In the words of anthropologist E. B, Tylor, it is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is the way of life, especially the customs and beliefs. As a defining aspect of what it means to be human, culture is a concept in anthropology. The word is used in a sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes seen to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of culture that emerged in the 20th century. When used as a count noun, a culture is the set of customs, traditions, in this sense, multiculturalism is a concept that values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes culture is used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a context, meaning something similar. His use, and that of many writers after him, refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human. To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensive to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, thus a contrast between culture and civilization is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such. Cultural invention has come to any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior. Humanity is in a global accelerating culture change period, driven by the expansion of commerce, the mass media, and above all. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the concept of a society. Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change, Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change, for example, the U. S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors, Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices

33.
Ethnic group
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An ethnic group or ethnicity is a category of people who identify with each other based on similarities, such as common ancestral, language, social, cultural or national experiences. Unlike other social groups, ethnicity is often an inherited status based on the society in which one lives, in some cases, it can be adopted if a person moves into another society. Ethnic groups, derived from the historical founder population, often continue to speak related languages. By way of language shift, acculturation, adoption and religious conversion, it is possible for individuals or groups to leave one ethnic group. Ethnicity is often used synonymously with terms such as nation or people. In English, it can also have the connotation of something exotic, generally related to cultures of more recent immigrants, the largest ethnic groups in modern times comprise hundreds of millions of individuals, while the smallest are limited to a few dozen individuals. Conversely, formerly separate ethnicities can merge to form a pan-ethnicity, whether through division or amalgamation, the formation of a separate ethnic identity is referred to as ethnogenesis. The term ethnic is derived from the Greek word ἔθνος ethnos, the inherited English language term for this concept is folk, used alongside the latinate people since the late Middle English period. In Early Modern English and until the mid-19th century, ethnic was used to mean heathen or pagan, as the Septuagint used ta ethne to translate the Hebrew goyim the nations, non-Hebrews, non-Jews. The Greek term in antiquity could refer to any large group, a host of men. In the 19th century, the term came to be used in the sense of peculiar to a race, people or nation, the abstract ethnicity had been used for paganism in the 18th century, but now came to express the meaning of an ethnic character. The term ethnic group was first recorded in 1935 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972, depending on the context that is used, the term nationality may either be used synonymously with ethnicity, or synonymously with citizenship. The process that results in the emergence of an ethnicity is called ethnogenesis, the Greeks at this time did not describe foreign nations but had also developed a concept of their own ethnicity, which they grouped under the name of Hellenes. Herodotus gave an account of what defined Greek ethnic identity in his day, enumerating shared descent. Whether ethnicity qualifies as a universal is to some extent dependent on the exact definition used. Many social scientists, such as anthropologists Fredrik Barth and Eric Wolf and they regard ethnicity as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than an essential quality inherent to human groups. According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, the study of ethnicity was dominated by two distinct debates until recently, one is between primordialism and instrumentalism. In the primordialist view, the participant perceives ethnic ties collectively, as a given, even coercive

34.
Evolution
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Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to biodiversity at every level of organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms. In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the LUCA of all living on Earth. The fossil record includes a progression from early biogenic graphite, to microbial mat fossils, existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped both by speciation and by extinction. More than 99 percent of all species that lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates of Earths current species range from 10 to 14 million, more recently, in May 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described. In the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection. This teleonomy is the quality whereby the process of natural selection creates and preserves traits that are fitted for the functional roles they perform. The processes by which the changes occur, from one generation to another, are called evolutionary processes or mechanisms, the four most widely recognized evolutionary processes are natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene migration. Natural selection and genetic drift sort variation, mutation and gene migration create variation, consequences of selection can include meiotic drive, nonrandom mating and genetic hitchhiking. In the early 20th century the modern evolutionary synthesis integrated classical genetics with Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection through the discipline of population genetics, the importance of natural selection as a cause of evolution was accepted into other branches of biology. Moreover, previously held notions about evolution, such as orthogenesis, evolutionism, evolutionary computation, a sub-field of artificial intelligence, involves the application of Darwinian principles to problems in computer science. The proposal that one type of organism could descend from another type goes back to some of the first pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander, such proposals survived into Roman times. The poet and philosopher Lucretius followed Empedocles in his masterwork De rerum natura, in contrast to these materialistic views, Aristotelianism considered all natural things as actualisations of fixed natural possibilities, known as forms. This was part of a teleological understanding of nature in which all things have an intended role to play in a divine cosmic order. In the 17th century, the new method of modern science rejected the Aristotelian approach, however, this new approach was slow to take root in the biological sciences, the last bastion of the concept of fixed natural types. The biological classification introduced by Carl Linnaeus in 1735 explicitly recognized the nature of species relationships. Other naturalists of this time speculated on the change of species over time according to natural laws

35.
Sociocultural evolution
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Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or cultural evolution are theories of cultural and social evolution that describe how cultures and societies change over time. Sociocultural evolution is the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, another attempt, on a less systematic scale, originated with the world-systems approach. More recent approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies and reject the idea that cultures differ primarily according to how far one is on the linear scale of social progress. Most modern archaeologists and cultural anthropologists work within the frameworks of neoevolutionism, sociobiology, anthropologists and sociologists often assume that human beings have natural social tendencies and that particular human social behaviours have non-genetic causes and dynamics. Societies exist in social environments and adapt themselves to these environments. It is thus inevitable that all societies change, specific theories of social or cultural evolution often attempt to explain differences between coeval societies, by positing that different societies have reached different stages of development. Most 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a single entity, however, most 20th-century approaches, such as multilineal evolution, focused on changes specific to individual societies. Most archaeologists work within the framework of multilineal evolution, other contemporary approaches to social change include neoevolutionism, sociobiology, dual inheritance theory, modernisation theory and postindustrial theory. In his seminal 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins wrote that there are examples of cultural evolution in birds and monkeys. It is our own species that shows what cultural evolution can do. Enlightenment and later thinkers often speculated that societies progressed through stages, in other words, while expecting humankind to show increasing development, theorists looked for what determined the course of human history. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for example, saw social development as an inevitable process and it was assumed that societies start out primitive, perhaps in a state of nature, and could progress toward something resembling industrial Europe. In relation to Scotlands union with England in 1707, several Scottish thinkers pondered the relationship between progress and the affluence brought about by increased trade with England and they understood the changes Scotland was undergoing as involving transition from an agricultural to a mercantile society. Philosophical concepts of progress, such as that of Hegel, developed as well during this period, in France, authors such as Claude Adrien Helvétius and other philosophes were influenced by the Scottish tradition. Later thinkers such as Comte de Saint-Simon developed these ideas, Auguste Comte in particular presented a coherent view of social progress and a new discipline to study it, sociology. These developments took place in a context of wider processes, similarly, effective colonial administration required some degree of understanding of other cultures. Modern civilization, appeared the result of steady progress from a state of barbarism, the second process was the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, which together allowed and promoted continual revolutions in the means of production. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolution reflected a belief that the changes in Europe brought by the Industrial Revolution and these theories had a common factor, they all agreed that the history of humanity is pursuing a certain fixed path, most likely that of social progress

36.
Meme
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A meme, a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts. A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts, criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that academic study can examine memes empirically. However, developments in neuroimaging may make empirical study possible, others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal. The word meme originated with Richard Dawkins 1976 book The Selfish Gene, later, he argued that his original intentions, presumably before his approval of Humphreys opinion, had been simpler. At the New Directors Showcase 2013 in Cannes, Dawkins opinion on memetics was deliberately ambiguous, examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches. The word meme originated with Richard Dawkins 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins cites as inspiration the work of geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist F. T. Cloak and ethologist J. M. Cullen, for Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution. T. H. Huxley claimed that The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world, a theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals. Dawkins used the term to refer to any entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the selection of genes in biological evolution. Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics. In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the functions of DNA

37.
Prehistory
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Prehistory means literally before history, from the Latin word for before, præ, and Greek ιστορία. Neighbouring civilisations were the first to follow, most other civilisations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age. The period when a culture is written about by others, but has not developed its own writing is known as the protohistory of the culture. By definition, there are no records from human prehistory. Clear techniques for dating were not well-developed until the 19th century and this article is concerned with human prehistory as defined here above. There are separate articles for the history of the Earth. However, for the race as a whole, prehistory ends when recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BC. For example, in Egypt it is accepted that prehistory ended around 3200 BC, whereas in New Guinea the end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently. The three-age system is the periodization of prehistory into three consecutive time periods, named for their respective predominant tool-making technologies, Stone Age Bronze Age Iron Age. The notion of prehistory began to surface during the Enlightenment in the work of antiquarians who used the word primitive to describe societies that existed before written records, the first use of the word prehistory in English, however, occurred in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1836. The main source for prehistory is archaeology, but some scholars are beginning to more use of evidence from the natural and social sciences. This view has been articulated by advocates of deep history, human population geneticists and historical linguists are also providing valuable insight for these questions. Human prehistory differs from history not only in terms of its chronology, restricted to material processes, remains and artifacts rather than written records, prehistory is anonymous. Because of this, reference terms that use, such as Neanderthal or Iron Age are modern labels with definitions sometimes subject to debate. Palaeolithic means Old Stone Age, and begins with the first use of stone tools, the Paleolithic is the earliest period of the Stone Age. The early part of the Palaeolithic is called the Lower Palaeolithic, evidence of control of fire by early humans during the Lower Palaeolithic Era is uncertain and has at best limited scholarly support. The most widely accepted claim is that H. erectus or H. ergaster made fires between 790,000 and 690,000 BP in a site at Bnot Yaakov Bridge, Israel. The use of fire enabled early humans to cook food, provide warmth, Early Homo sapiens originated some 200,000 years ago, ushering in the Middle Palaeolithic

38.
Race (human classification)
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Race is the classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, ancestry, genetics, or social relations, or the relations between them. First used to refer to speakers of a language and then to denote national affiliations. The term was used in a general biological taxonomic sense, starting from the 19th century. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits, scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits. Although still used in contexts, race has often been replaced by less ambiguous and emotionally charged synonyms, populations, people, ethnic groups, or communities. A popular view in American sociology is that the categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed. For this reason, there is no current consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation, when people define and talk about a particular conception of race, they create a social reality through which social categorization is achieved. In this sense, races are said to be social constructs and these constructs develop within various legal, economic, and sociopolitical contexts, and may be the effect, rather than the cause, of major social situations. Socioeconomic factors, in combination with early but enduring views of race, have led to considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial groups, as a result, racial groups possessing relatively little power often find themselves excluded or oppressed, while hegemonic individuals and institutions are charged with holding racist attitudes. Racism has led to instances of tragedy, including slavery. In some countries, law enforcement uses race to profile suspects and this use of racial categories is frequently criticized for perpetuating an outmoded understanding of human biological variation, and promoting stereotypes. Because in some societies racial groupings correspond closely with patterns of stratification, for social scientists studying social inequality. As sociological factors, racial categories may in part reflect subjective attributions, self-identities, accordingly, the racial paradigms employed in different disciplines vary in their emphasis on biological reduction as contrasted with societal construction. Groups of humans have identified themselves as distinct from neighboring groups. These features are the features of how the concept of race is used today. As Europeans encountered people from different parts of the world, they speculated about the physical, social, a set of folk beliefs took hold that linked inherited physical differences between groups to inherited intellectual, behavioral, and moral qualities. Brutal conflicts between groups have existed throughout history and across the world. In the 18th century the differences among human groups became a focus of scientific investigation, Homo sapiens europaeus was described as active, acute, and adventurous, whereas Homo sapiens afer was said to be crafty, lazy, and careless

39.
Society
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In the social sciences, a larger society often evinces stratification or dominance patterns in subgroups. A society can also consist of like-minded people governed by their own norms and values within a dominant and this is sometimes referred to as a subculture, a term used extensively within criminology. The term society came from the Latin word societas, which in turn was derived from the noun used to describe a bond or interaction between parties that are friendly, or at least civil. Without an article, the term can refer to the entirety of humanity, Society, in general, addresses the fact that an individual has rather limited means as an autonomous unit. Cultural relativism as an approach or ethic has largely replaced notions of primitive, better/worse. Societies may also be structured politically, in order of increasing size and complexity, there are bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and state societies. These structures may have varying degrees of power, depending on the cultural, geographical. Thus, an isolated society with the same level of technology. A society that is unable to offer a response to other societies it competes with will usually be subsumed into the culture of the competing society. Sociologist Peter L. Berger defines society as. a human product, and nothing but a human product, according to him, society was created by humans but this creation turns back and creates or molds humans every day. This is similar to the earlier developed by anthropologists Morton H. This system of classification contains four categories, Hunter-gatherer bands, tribal societies in which there are some limited instances of social rank and prestige. Civilizations, with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments, in addition to this there are, Humanity, mankind, upon which rest all the elements of society, including societys beliefs. Virtual society, a society based on identity, which is evolving in the information age. Over time, some cultures have progressed toward more complex forms of organization and this cultural evolution has a profound effect on patterns of community. Hunter-gatherer tribes settled around seasonal food stocks to become agrarian villages, villages grew to become towns and cities. Cities turned into city-states and nation-states, many societies distribute largess at the behest of some individual or some larger group of people. This type of generosity can be seen in all cultures, typically

Society
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A half-section of the 12th-century South Tang Dynasty version of Night Revels of Han Xizai, original by Gu Hongzhong. The painting portrays servants, musicians, monks, children, guests, and hosts all in a single social environment. It serves as an in-depth look into the Chinese social structure of the time.
Society
Society
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The social group enables its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis. Both individual and social (common) goals can thus be distinguished and considered. Ant (formicidae) social ethology.
Society
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Canis lupus social ethology

40.
Colonialism
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Colonialism is the establishment of a colony in one territory by a political power from another territory, and the subsequent maintenance, expansion, and exploitation of that colony. The term is used to describe a set of unequal relationships between the colonial power and the colony and often between the colonists and the indigenous peoples. The European colonial period was the era from the 16th century to the century when several European powers established colonies in Asia, Africa. At first the countries followed a policy of mercantilism, designed to strengthen the economy at the expense of rivals. By the mid-19th century, however, the powerful British Empire gave up mercantilism and trade restrictions and introduced the principle of free trade, collins English Dictionary defines colonialism as the policy and practice of a power in extending control over weaker peoples or areas. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers four definitions, including something characteristic of a colony, in the book, Osterhammel asks, How can colonialism be defined independently from colony. He settles on a definition, Colonialism is a relationship between an indigenous majority and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the people are made. Rejecting cultural compromises with the population, the colonizers are convinced of their own superiority. Historians often distinguish between two overlapping forms of colonialism, Settler colonialism involves large-scale immigration, often motivated by religious, political, exploitation colonialism involves fewer colonists and focuses on access to resources for export, typically to the metropole. Surrogate colonialism involves a settlement project supported by a colonial power, internal colonialism is a notion of uneven structural power between areas of a state. The source of exploitation comes from within the state, as colonialism often played out in pre-populated areas, sociocultural evolution included the formation of various ethnically hybrid populations. In fact, everywhere where colonial powers established a consistent and continued presence, notable examples in Asia include the Anglo-Burmese, Anglo-Indian, Burgher, Eurasian Singaporean, Filipino mestizo, Kristang and Macanese peoples. In the Dutch East Indies the vast majority of Dutch settlers were in fact Eurasians known as Indo-Europeans, the Other, or othering is the process of creating a separate entity to persons or groups who are labelled as different or non-normal due to the repetition of characteristics. Othering is the creation from those who discriminate, to distinguish, label, several scholars in recent decades developed the notion of the other as an epistemological concept in social theory. For example, postcolonial scholars, believed that colonizing powers explained an ‘other’ who were there to dominate, civilize, political geographers explain how colonial/ imperial powers othered places they wanted to dominate to legalize their exploitation of the land. During the rise of colonialism and after, post colonialism, the Western powers perspectives of the East as the other, different and this viewpoint and separation of culture had divided the Eastern and Western culture creating a dominant/ subordinate dynamic, both being the other towards themselves. The word metropole comes from the Greek metropolis —mother city, the word colony comes from the Latin colonia—a place for agriculture

41.
Postcolonialism
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Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is an academic discipline that analyzes, explains, and responds to the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism speaks about the consequences of external control and economic exploitation of native people. As a genre of history, postcolonialism questions and reinvents the manner in which a culture is being viewed. Anthropologically, it records human nations between the colonists and the peoples under colonial rule, seeking to build an understanding of the nature and practice of colonial rule. It also examines the effects of rule on the cultural aspects of the colony and its treatment of women, language, literature. Postcolonialism is aimed at destabilizing these theories by means of which colonialists perceive, understand, Colonialism was presented as the extension of civilization, which ideologically justified the self-ascribed racial and cultural superiority of the Western world over the non-Western world. Especially in the colonisation of the Far East and in the late-nineteenth century Scramble for Africa, hence, Belgium and Britain, and France and Germany proffered theories of national superiority that justified colonialism as delivering the light of civilisation to unenlightened peoples. A decolonised people develops a postcolonial identity that is based on interactions between different identities which are assigned varying degrees of social power by the colonial society. e. Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania, in The Wretched of the Earth, the psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon analysed and medically described the nature of colonialism as essentially destructive. Its societal effects—the imposition of a subjugating colonial identity—are harmful to the health of the native peoples who were subjugated into colonies. Fanon wrote the ideological essence of colonialism is the denial of all attributes of humanity of the colonised people. Such dehumanization is achieved with physical and mental violence, by which the colonist means to inculcate a servile mentality upon the natives, for Fanon the natives must violently resist colonial subjugation. Hence, Fanon describes violent resistance to colonialism as a mentally cathartic practice, which purges colonial servility from the native psyche, thus he supported the Front de Libération Nationale in the Algerian War for independence from France. Michel Foucault argues that colonial discourses are where power and knowledge become intertwined and his work implies that power does not exist for punitive measures but rather, power provides a consistent gratification during its perpetual expression. Orientalism thus conflated and reduced the world into the homogeneous cultural entity known as the East. In Edward Said, The Exile as Interpreter, about Saïds Orientalism and that the applied power of such cultural knowledge allowed Europeans to rename, re-define, and thereby control Oriental peoples, places, and things, into imperial colonies. The power–knowledge binary relation is conceptually essential to identify and understand colonialism in general, with this described binary logic, the West generally constructs the Orient subconsciously as its alter ego. Therefore, descriptions of the Orient by the Occident lack material attributes and this inventive, or imaginative interpretation subscribes female characteristics to the Orient and plays into fantasies that are inherent within the Wests alter ego

Postcolonialism
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The Motherland and her dependant colonial offspring. (William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1883)
Postcolonialism
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In La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), the Orientalist Joseph-Ernest Renan, advocated imperial stewardship for civilising the non–Western peoples of the world.
Postcolonialism
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In the essay "The African Character" (1830), Hegel says that some cultures lagged in their development, and needed Christian–European stewardship to mature towards civilisation.
Postcolonialism
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In the novel Things Fall Apart (1958), the writer Chinua Achebe described native life in the British colony of Nigeria.

42.
Culture theory
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Culture theory is the branch of comparative anthropology and semiotics that seeks to define the heuristic concept of culture in operational and/or scientific terms. In the 19th century, culture was used by some to refer to an array of human activities. In the 20th century, anthropologists began theorizing about culture as an object of scientific analysis, both groups understood culture as being definitive of human nature. According to many theories that have gained acceptance among anthropologists, culture exhibits the way that humans interpret their biology. For example, chimpanzees have big brains, but human brains are bigger, similarly, bonobos exhibit complex sexual behaviour, but human beings exhibit much more complex sexual behaviours. Acceleration and amplification of these aspects of culture change have been explored by complexity economist. In his book, The Nature of Technology, Arthur attempts to articulate a theory of change that considers that existing technologies are combined in ways that lead to novel new technologies. Behind that novel combination is a purposeful effort arising in human motivation, the Nature of the Engineering, A Philosophy of Technology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.1966

Culture theory
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Sub-fields

43.
Trans-cultural diffusion
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It is distinct from the diffusion of innovations within a specific culture. Examples of diffusion include the spread of the war chariot and iron smelting in ancient times, and this can include hierarchical, stimulus, and contagious diffusion. Relocation diffusion, an idea or innovation that migrates into new areas, hierarchical diffusion, an idea or innovation that spreads by moving from larger to smaller places, often with little regard to the distance between places, and often influenced by social elites. Contagious diffusion, an idea or innovation that spreads based on contact within a given population. Stimulus diffusion, an idea or innovation that spreads based on its attachment to another concept, inter-cultural diffusion can happen in many ways. Migrating populations will carry their culture with them, ideas can be carried by trans-cultural visitors, such as merchants, explorers, soldiers, diplomats, slaves, and hired artisans. Technology diffusion has occurred by one society luring skilled scientists or workers by payments or other inducement. Trans-cultural marriages between two neighboring or interspersed cultures have also contributed, among literate societies, diffusion can occur through letters, books, and, in modern times, through electronic media. There are three categories of diffusion mechanisms, Direct diffusion occurs when two cultures are very close to other, resulting in intermarriage, trade, and even warfare. Forced diffusion occurs when one culture subjugates another culture and forces its own customs on the conquered people, indirect diffusion happens when traits are passed from one culture through a middleman to another culture, without the first and final cultures being in direct contact. An example could be the presence of Mexican food in Canada, Direct diffusion was common in ancient times, when small groups of humans lived in adjoining settlements. Indirect diffusion is common in todays world because of the mass media and this concept was invoked with regard to the independent development of calculus by Newton and Leibnitz, and the inventions of the airplane and of the electronic computer. Early theories of hyperdiffusionism can be traced to ideas about South America being the origin of mankind, the work of Grafton Elliot Smith fomented a revival of hyperdiffusionism in 1911, he asserted that copper–producing knowledge spread from Egypt to the rest of the world along with megalithic culture. Smith claimed that all major inventions had been made by the ancient Egyptians and were carried to the rest of the world by migrants and his views became known as Egyptocentric-Hyperdiffusionism. William James Perry elaborated on Smiths hypothesis by using ethnographic data, another hyperdiffusionist was Lord Raglan, in his book How Came Civilization he wrote that instead of Egypt all culture and civilization had come from Mesopotamia. Hyperdiffusionism after this did not entirely disappear, but it was abandoned by mainstream academia. Historians have questioned recently whether Europe really owes the development of such inventions as gunpowder, the compass, while the concept of diffusion is well accepted in general, conjectures about the existence or the extent of diffusion in some specific contexts have been hotly disputed. Heyerdahls theory of Polynesian origins has not gained acceptance among anthropologists, major contributors to inter-cultural diffusion research and theory include, Franz Boas Anne Walbank Buckland James Burnett, Lord Monboddo Leo Frobenius Cyrus H. Gordon Fritz Graebner A. C

44.
Boasian anthropology
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Boasian anthropology was a school within American anthropology founded by Franz Boas in the late 19th century. It was based on the model of anthropology uniting the fields of cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, physical anthropology. In this way Boasian anthropologists did not assume as a given that non-Western societies are necessarily inferior to Western ones, Boasian anthropology in this way tended to consider political activism, through scientific education about society, a significant part of the scientific project. Boasian Anthropology, Historical Particularism and Cultural Relativism at Anthrotheoru. pbworks. com

45.
Structural functionalism
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Structural functionalism, or simply functionalism, is a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. This approach looks at society through an orientation, which is a broad focus on the social structures that shape society as a whole. This approach looks at both social structure and social functions, Functionalism addresses society as a whole in terms of the function of its constituent elements, namely norms, customs, traditions, and institutions. A common analogy, popularized by Herbert Spencer, presents these parts of society as organs that work toward the proper functioning of the body as a whole. For Talcott Parsons, structural-functionalism came to describe a stage in the methodological development of social science. Biology has been taken to provide a guide to conceptualizing the structure, Functionalism strongly emphasises the pre-eminence of the social world over its individual parts. Functionalism also has a basis in the work of theorists such as Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski. It is in Radcliffe-Browns specific usage that the prefix structural emerged, Radcliffe-Brown proposed that most stateless, primitive societies, lacking strong centralized institutions, are based on an association of corporate-descent groups. Structural functionalism also took on Malinowskis argument that the building block of society is the nuclear family. Émile Durkheim was concerned with the question of how certain societies maintain internal stability and he proposed that such societies tend to be segmented, with equivalent parts held together by shared values, common symbols or, as his nephew Marcel Mauss held, systems of exchanges. Durkheim used the mechanical solidarity to refer to these types of social bonds, based on common sentiments & shared moral values. In modern, complex societies, members perform very different tasks and these views were upheld by Durkheim, who, following Comte, believed that society constitutes a separate level of reality, distinct from both biological and inorganic matter. Explanations of social phenomena had therefore to be constructed within this level, the central concern of structural functionalism is a continuation of the Durkheimian task of explaining the apparent stability and internal cohesion needed by societies to endure over time. All social and cultural phenomena are seen as functional in the sense of working together. They are primarily analyzed in terms of this function, the individual is significant not in and of himself, but rather in terms of his status, his position in patterns of social relations, and the behaviours associated with his status. Therefore, the structure is the network of statuses connected by associated roles. It is simplistic to equate the perspective directly with political conservatism, the tendency to emphasize cohesive systems, however, leads functionalist theories to be contrasted with conflict theories which instead emphasize social problems and inequalities. Auguste Comte, the Father of Positivism, pointed out the need to keep society unified as many traditions were diminishing and he was the first person to coin the term sociology

46.
Post-structuralism
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Existential phenomenology is a significant influence, Colin Davis has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called post-phenomenologists. Post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault did not form a self-conscious group, Structuralism rejected the phenomenological idea that knowledge could be centred on the human knower, and sought what they considered a more secure foundation for knowledge. In phenomenology, this foundation is experience itself, in structuralism, knowledge is founded on the structures that make possible, concepts. By contrast, post-structuralism argues that founding knowledge either on experience or systematic structures is impossible. This impossibility was not meant as a failure or loss, a major theory associated with Structuralism was binary opposition. This theory proposed that there are theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy. Such binary pairs could include Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified, the only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems that produce multiplicity, the illusion of singular meaning. It emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results, post-structuralism offers a way of studying how knowledge is produced and critiques structuralist premises. It argues that history and culture condition the study of underlying structures. A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object, it is necessary to both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object. Post-structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and they classify structuralism as descriptive and this terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussures distinction between the views of historical and descriptive reading. From this basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts, by studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, post-structuralists seek to understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the present. For example, Michel Foucaults Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness, the uncertain distance between structuralism and post-structuralism is further blurred by the fact that scholars rarely label themselves as post-structuralists. Some scholars associated with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes and Foucault, some observers from outside the post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigor and legitimacy of the field. American philosopher John Searle argued in 1990 that The spread of poststructuralist literary theory is perhaps the best known example of a silly, similarly, physicist Alan Sokal in 1997 criticized the postmodernist/poststructuralist gibberish that is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American academy. Has elicited wrong film and literary theory on a grand scale, one can find dozens of books of literary theory bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refer to Chomsky. Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing structuralism, merquior a love–hate relationship with structuralism developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s. In a 1966 lecture Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life, Derrida interpreted this event as a decentering of the former intellectual cosmos

47.
List of indigenous peoples
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This is a partial list of the worlds indigenous / aboriginal / native people. e. Note that this is a listing of peoples, groups and communities, many of the names are externally imposed, and are not those the people identify within their cultures. As John Trudell observed, They change our name and treat us the same, basic to the unethical treatment of indigenous peoples is an insistence that the original inhabitants of the land are not permitted to name themselves. In this list, native ethnonyms are given in round brackets, in some cases the endonym is the name by which the ethnic group/people is called by other peoples. However, in most cases, exonyms predominate and this list is grouped by region, and sub-region. Note that a group may warrant listing under more than one region, either because the group is distributed in more than one region. This preserves for these communities the right and power to decide who belongs to them. Nuer, mainly in Jonglei State, East of Upper Nile river course, luo peoples Anuak, mainly East Jonglei State, East South Sudan, and also mainly in Gambela Region, Lowlands of Far Southwest Ethiopia. Shilluk, mainly in North South Sudan, west of the Upper Nile river course, Upper Nile State, surmic peoples South Southeast Surma Mursi, mainly in Debub Omo Zone, Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region, Southwest Ethiopia. Kadu peoples, Sudan, Nuba Hills Hadza, Tanzania, Singida region, southeast, south, sandawe, Tanzania, Dodoma region, Kondoa district, between Bubu and Mponde rivers, Singida region. However not all modern assyrians are descendants from old assyrians, several are from other peoples that adopted an ethnic identity. West Semitic peoples Central Semitic peoples Arabic peoples Bedouin of the deserts of Arabia and Syria. Canaanite peoples Jews, of the Judaean Mountains, and the region of Judea. Additionally, a number of Jews returned from diaspora during the 19th and 20th centuries. DNA studies show that all major diaspora Jewish communities, with the exception of Ethiopian and Yemenite Jews, religiously, the Samaritans are adherents of Samaritanism, an Abrahamic religion closely related to Judaism. Their sole norm of religious observance is the Samaritan Pentateuch, mandaeans, Southern Mesopotamia spoke a variety of Aramaic, practices a unique gnostic religion, Mandaeism. South Semitic peoples Eastern South Semitic peoples Bathari people, Dhofar, descendants from the original people of Dhofar before Arabization. Descendants from the people of South Arabia before Arabization

48.
Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population

49.
Cultural
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Culture can be defined in numerous ways. In the words of anthropologist E. B, Tylor, it is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is the way of life, especially the customs and beliefs. As a defining aspect of what it means to be human, culture is a concept in anthropology. The word is used in a sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes seen to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of culture that emerged in the 20th century. When used as a count noun, a culture is the set of customs, traditions, in this sense, multiculturalism is a concept that values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes culture is used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a context, meaning something similar. His use, and that of many writers after him, refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human. To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensive to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, thus a contrast between culture and civilization is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such. Cultural invention has come to any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior. Humanity is in a global accelerating culture change period, driven by the expansion of commerce, the mass media, and above all. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the concept of a society. Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change, Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change, for example, the U. S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors, Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices

50.
Social sciences
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Social science is a major category of academic disciplines, concerned with society and the relationships among individuals within a society. It in turn has many branches, each of which is considered a social science, the social sciences include economics, political science, human geography, demography, psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, jurisprudence, history, and linguistics. The term is sometimes used to refer specifically to the field of sociology. A more detailed list of sub-disciplines within the sciences can be found at Outline of social science. Positivist social scientists use methods resembling those of the sciences as tools for understanding society. In modern academic practice, researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies, the term social research has also acquired a degree of autonomy as practitioners from various disciplines share in its aims and methods. Social sciences came forth from the philosophy of the time and were influenced by the Age of Revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution. The social sciences developed from the sciences, or the systematic knowledge-bases or prescriptive practices, the beginnings of the social sciences in the 18th century are reflected in the grand encyclopedia of Diderot, with articles from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other pioneers. The growth of the sciences is also reflected in other specialized encyclopedias. The modern period saw social science first used as a distinct conceptual field, Social science was influenced by positivism, focusing on knowledge based on actual positive sense experience and avoiding the negative, metaphysical speculation was avoided. Auguste Comte used the term science sociale to describe the field, taken from the ideas of Charles Fourier, following this period, there were five paths of development that sprang forth in the social sciences, influenced by Comte on other fields. One route that was taken was the rise of social research, large statistical surveys were undertaken in various parts of the United States and Europe. Another route undertaken was initiated by Émile Durkheim, studying social facts, a third means developed, arising from the methodological dichotomy present, in which social phenomena were identified with and understood, this was championed by figures such as Max Weber. The fourth route taken, based in economics, was developed and furthered economic knowledge as a hard science, the last path was the correlation of knowledge and social values, the antipositivism and verstehen sociology of Max Weber firmly demanded this distinction. In this route, theory and prescription were non-overlapping formal discussions of a subject, around the start of the 20th century, Enlightenment philosophy was challenged in various quarters. The development of social science subfields became very quantitative in methodology, examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social research of medicine, sociobiology, neuropsychology, bioeconomics and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative research and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of action and its implications. In the first half of the 20th century, statistics became a discipline of applied mathematics

Social sciences
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Buyers bargain for good prices while sellers put forth their best front in Chichicastenango Market, Guatemala.
Social sciences
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A depiction of world's oldest university, the University of Bologna, in Italy
Social sciences
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This article is about the science studying social groups. For the integrated field of study intended to promote civic competence, see Social studies.
Social sciences
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A trial at a criminal court, the Old Bailey in London